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Here at the Edge of the World

Atlantis as envisioned by computer graphic artist, for the Nat Geo program Finding Atlantis. The producers say that the image is a composite of many ideas from classical monuments.

Dear Friend and Reader:

In the midst of all of this nuclear madness, Nat Geo channel premiered a special about some scientists who have discovered the remnants of what they believe is the lost city of Atlantis. Its location, according to the theory? Some mud flats in southern Spain, near Portugal, called Donaña. The program, called “Finding Atlantis,” was created for the Nat Geo channel by a Canadian production company, and with a little research is revealed to be controversial.

Beneath this concrete dome on Runit Island (part of Enewetak Atoll), built between 1977 and 1980 at a cost of about $239 million, lie 111,000 cubic yards (84,927 cubic meters) of radioactive soil and debris from atomic bomb tests on the Bikini and Rongelap atolls. The dome covers the 30-foot (9-meter) deep, 350-foot (107-meter) wide crater created by the May 5, 1958, Cactus test. Note the people atop the dome. Credit: Defense Special Weapons Agency.

The original archeological project, started by a Spanish team and then joined by Richard Freund of the University of Hartford, searched the Donaña bogs using a kind of MRI device, looking for underground evidence of a civilization of which they seem to have found some additional clues (this is a previously researched site). Freund proposes that the location of the presumed Atlantis focused on by the special was destroyed by a tidal wave. “This is the power of tsunamis,” he told Reuters. “It is just so hard to understand that it can wipe out 60 miles inland, and that’s pretty much what we’re talking about.”

“Debate about whether Atlantis truly existed has lasted for thousands of years,” Reuters reported as background to the program. “Plato’s ‘dialogues’ from around 360 B.C. are the only known historical sources of information about the iconic city. Plato said the island he called Atlantis ‘in a single day and night…disappeared into the depths of the sea’.” Yet though many have gone searching for Atlantis, others believe that Plato was speaking in a kind of intellectual metaphor.

Of the things about the archeological find that Freund claims exist, the most endearing are models of the fabled city that were supposedly created as memorials by its refugees who landed in Spain — something denied by the Spanish scientists who say that no such models were found. For our purposes, though, it doesn’t matter whether the TV special is true or not — what matters is that the symbol of Atlantis makes a spontaneous appearance in our culture just as the world is on the brink of nuclear disaster.

Though we know very little about the actual Atlantis — including what it was called, when it existed, or whether it existed — the archetype of the lost continent is a persistent aspect of human consciousness. Sometimes it’s called Lemuria, or Mu. From one past-life regression about 10 years ago, I have a direct memory of being captain of a merchant marine vessel when Antarctica was inhabited, at the time of the mass evacuation from that continent. According to what I learned in my regression, one of the destinations for refugees was Spain. My wife went there. I stayed behind. It turned out that the leaders of the society who ordered the evacuation were about a century or two early in their predictions.

The myth of the lost civilization is persistent and it is intriguing. So, too, is the notion that a civilization, such as our own, might fall by its own undoing. I don’t think there is anyone who hasn’t considered whether this is inevitable; not out of any particular meanness or religious belief, but rather because we’re such a bunch of dumb asses who refuse to wake up.

Until 1970, solid low-level and transuranic waste at the Atomic Energy Commission’s nuclear weapons facilities (shown here is Hanford Reservation, circa 1950s) was frequently disposed of in cardboard boxes. Once filled, this unlined trench would have been covered with dirt, leaving the cardboard to deteriorate and allowing the waste to contaminate the soil and leach into the groundwater. Photo from the Brookings Institution archives.

In modern mythology, Atlantis represents a society that was stricken from Earth because it was unable to handle the technology that it created. In some versions of the tale, that is specifically what we (in our era of gadgets) would think of as spiritual technology (telepathy, mental manipulation of matter and time), yet where the ethical capacity to handle these talents has failed to evolve along with the power we hold.

It is the same basic idea; and it’s the same issue we’re facing now. It’s what Kurt Vonnegut was talking about in Cat’s Cradle, which we read about two weeks ago when I covered Borasisi. In a particularly literal moment of astrology, the idea for the chemical that ends the world came out of General Electric, when Vonnegut was a PR man there. Notably, GE manufactured the transformers that are now threatening to spin totally out of control. This gives us a hint, by the way, that Borasisi has a resonance with the long history of crimes committed by GE.

Atlantis shows up as a factor in astrology as well. Minor planet specialist Martha Lang-Wescott delineates the asteroid (1198) Atlantis with the following themes: “Sense of impending doom; belief in deserved punishment/negative karma; invasions of privacy; access to inside or confidential information; abuse of resources, talents or information; importance of confidentiality/use of knowledge; water disasters; warnings.”

In a phone interview Thursday, Wescott added another theme: “The other part of Atlantis is a negative projection, and we’re seeing a lot of that. Atlantis is ‘doomsday is here’.” For example, she says that, “People with Venus/Atlantis aspects doom their relationships. If Atlantis is prominent [in a public chart], then you’re going to hear astrologers talking about doom and gloom.”

Here in our era dominated by the negative obsessions of fundamentalist Christians, there’s plenty of that; it’s a religion based on the Revelation or the Rapture or the Apocalypse, which is the supposed ‘end of the world’ — predicted relentlessly for the past two thousand years (blended artfully with a radically sex-negative message), and presumed in modern times to be nuclear. I often wonder whether all these negative projections about cataclysm are adding up to the thing itself. Human thought is powerfully creative, and the federal budget has a lot of potential.

Museum display replica of the ‘Fat Man’ bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. Photo is from the Digital Photo Archive, Department of Energy (DOE), courtesy AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives. It is part of the Manhattan Project collection.

It is little known that J.R.R. Tolkien, in a work called The Silmarillion, gives his own version of the fall of Atlantis, an island he calls Numenor, located off of the western shores of Middle Earth. Numenor existed about 35 generations prior to the commencement of action in The Lord of the Rings. Anyone who has read this book has met and loved one of the descendants of its refugees — Strider (Aragorn, son of Arathorn), who becomes King Elessar I. Most of the wondrous places that readers visit along the way as Frodo and Samwise seek to destroy the ring were created by former Numenorian refugees and their descendants. The fictional empires of Arnor and Gondor were founded by a handful of people who escaped to Middle Earth right before a quake and tsunami destroyed Numenor. That is why they were described as the ‘race of kings’. They founded empires. Incidentally there is a direct bloodline back to Elros, the founder of Numenor preserved by Strider in the group of which Strider is a part, which is known as the Rangers of the North. In other words Strider would be heir to the Numenorian throne, had that civilization existed in his day.

The most beloved fantasy novel of the 20th century has its early origins in a version of Atlantis. Numenor falls because its people, who live long and abundant lives in a kind of paradise, are terrified of death. They first become obsessed by wealth, then they crave the power and immortality of the gods who live on islands further west. Their downfall is propagated by Sauron, in an earlier incarnation than we know him in The Lord of the Rings. Their hubris is spiritual rather than technological: based on their fear of the unknown, they want to live forever.

More recently, in Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch, there is a part that I think of as the Atlantis passage. “As I have said, this isn’t the first time your civilization has been at this brink,” God says to Walsch at one point in their dialogue.

“I want to repeat this, because it is vital that you hear this. Once before on your planet, the technology you developed was far greater than your ability to use it responsibly. You are approaching the same point in human history again. It is vitally important that you understand this. Your present technology is threatening to outstrip your ability to use it wisely. Your society is on the verge of becoming a product of your technology rather than your technology being a product of your society. When a society becomes a product of its own technology, it destroys itself.”

Whatever you may be hearing about the nuclear crisis in Japan, this week human civilization is now revealing how close it is to doing just that.

Fukushima Daiichi: Thousands of Tons of Radioactive Waste

As of this writing on Thursday evening, here is the situation at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. All six of its reactor cores are in some level of distress after being damaged by an earthquake and tsunami one week ago. We’ve been covering this extensively on the Planet Waves blog — here are some of those articles, and my most recent audio. In short, the tsunami damaged the reactors’ cooling systems, which has allowed the fuel to heat up and in three cases, partially melt.

Uncapped spent nuclear fuel stored underwater in K-East Basin on the Hanford nuclear site in Washington. Photo is from the Department of Energy archives.

As a result, there have been hydrogen explosions in reactors 1, 2 and 3. From what I am reading, it’s fairly certain that the explosions in 2 and 3 breached the steel inner containment structures. Fuel cores have been exposed in all three due to cooling system failures, and there is a struggle to keep any water level at all in units 2 and 3. This means the fuel cores have melted partially and may melt entirely if they get too hot and the self-sustaining reaction goes out of control. When you hear news reporters use the word ‘catastrophic’ to describe something worse than is now happening, that’s what they are hinting at.

While a full meltdown creates a worst-case scenario for reasons I will explain in a moment, Unit 3 has a special issue: about 6% of the fuel is called MOX, or mixed oxide, which contains plutonium.

Plutonium is another universe of toxicity than uranium. Inhaling as little as one-millionth of a gram can cause lung cancer, according to Dr. Helen Caldicott, co-founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility. I would dare to say it’s more toxic than the worst dioxin, TCDD. Every single gram of the stuff is supposed to be highly regulated. So there is a special focus right now on Unit 3, though the presence of plutonium is rarely being mentioned; it is getting a bit of attention and I’m glad of that. Here is an NPR article that covers the issue, even as the Tea Baggers try to pull federal funding for that station. And it is mentioned in this New York Times article.

Impressively, the Times reported Thursday night, “The decision to focus on the No. 3 reactor appeared to suggest that Japanese officials believe it is a greater threat, since it is the only one at the site loaded with a mixed fuel known as MOX, for mixed oxide, which includes reclaimed plutonium.”

This is a tank farm under construction on the Hanford nuclear site in Washington. The principal function of the tank farms is the storage of byproduct material left over from plutonium extraction operations prior to permanent disposal. This byproduct material has no useful purpose and is stored in 177 underground storage tanks with a cumulative total capacity of 55 million gallons, with individual tanks ranging up to 1,000,000 gallons (pictured). This waste material is composed of toxic chemicals that were used to remove fission products from irradiated reactor fuel. Photo is from the Department of Energy.

Unit 4, meanwhile, has another issue. The spent fuel pond (a storage area for massive amounts of old fuel rods) has run dry (or was pumped dry in an emergency need for water) and the old rods are getting very hot from fission reactions that are stirring to life — hot enough to potentially melt down. Unit 4 has burst into flames several times, apparently not from hydrogen explosions but rather from the fuel rods themselves starting to burn (most likely, the explosive zirconium cladding). The problem with spent fuel is that it contains high concentrations of the degradation products of fission, a whole stew of isotopes that move through the food chain and can jeopardize many organ systems.

Units 3 and 4 are currently being doused with seawater by helicopters, a technology better suited for fighting a forest fire. This is an utterly desperate measure. Units 1 and 2 are, we’re told, being refilled ongoing with fire hoses and water cannons. As of late Thursday, engineers were still trying to restore power to the plant, which could provide some hope of the remaining cooling systems coming back online. And, by the way, there are problems with the spent fuel storage facilities heating up in Units 5 and 6, though the reactor cores in those units are presumably in fairly good shape compared to the others. But I have not heard the words ‘cold shutdown’ applied to them.

Assuming the situation stays stable for a while and is eventually brought under some vague semblance of control, that still implies the release of a plume of radioactive steam, an underground plume and a flood of radiation into the Pacific Ocean. This will contaminate much of Japan, and because the Jet Stream carries air east at a fairly rapid speed, I’ve read the plume will reach North America (particularly the West Coast) as early as this weekend. The levels may seem low at the moment. But relatively low levels of radioactivity can cause the same issues as higher doses based on what is known as the Petkau effect.

In addition, there is the issue of bioconcentration. Radioactive materials move through the food chain quickly, concentrating not only in predators but (for example) also in grass-eating cows. There is no such thing as a little radiation, and every drop of the water being dumped onto these reactor cores is turning radioactive and being released to the biosphere.

Manhattan Project at Los Alamos Laboratory presents award to Robert Oppenheimer, a key scientist who developed the atomic bomb. Left to right are Oppenheimer (the wraith in the white hat), General Leslie Groves and Robert G. Sproul. Photo is circa 1945, from the Digital Photo Archive, Department of Energy (DOE), courtesy AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives.

That was the good news. Borrowing from Rachel Maddow, I know this is a difficult time to say worse, but it actually can get worse and has been hovering close to it from day to day.

Remember that we are in new territory where nuclear accidents are concerned. This specific thing has never happened before. However, it is probable that if even one of these reactor cores or spent fuel ponds goes into full meltdown, it can sink below the land, reach the water table and create an underground explosion that destroys the small swath of land where this drama is unfolding, causing all of the reactor cores and spent fuel to go out of control. In any event there would be too much radiation for anyone to stay on the site keeping a grip on the others.

That would make Chernobyl into something that seems like a Science Fair experiment by comparison — and it wasn’t. There were about 180 tons of radioactive fuel involved in Chernobyl. At Fukushima, there are at minimum 1,000 tons and so far as I can tell, as much as 3,000 tons (including spent fuel) based on comments made by our government Wednesday, all concentrated in this one facility. (Rachel Maddow covered this in some detail last night).

The Full Moon, and the Aries Sun Conjunct Uranus

The astrology for the next five days is not particularly encouraging, though if the workers now sacrificing their lives at the plant can keep a grip on this through around March 24, I would say the situation might de-escalate. Here’s my reasoning.

Leó Szilárd, one of the co-inventors of nuclear fission and the atomic bomb. Recalling the night of his invention, he wrote, “We turned the switch, saw the flashes, watched for ten minutes, then switched everything off and went home. That night I knew the world was headed for sorrow.” Original copy of this image is held in the Ava Helen and Linus Pauling Papers, Oregon State University Libraries.

We are currently building into the Full Moon in Virgo. This is a close Full Moon, happening at perigee. It’s running with a lot of momentum, and it’s happening at the very end of the astrological year, with the Sun at equinox — about to enter Aries. Hence Saturday’s Full Moon is an Aries Point event, which (as we have seen) tends to magnify things greatly and brings a lot of people into whatever situation is involved. It’s the world crashing into your living room. It’s you taking part in collective destiny in some direct way, just like we saw the people of Wisconsin do.

The Full Moon represents a peak, and the Sun-Uranus conjunction exactly on the equinox represents a kind of collective surprise development. Let’s hope that’s about some friendly space aliens showing up with their radiation extinguishing devices and cooling off the whole situation; that’s approximately what we need right now, because so far, things could use improvement.

A number of other features make this a pretty special Full Moon. For example, it’s directly involved with the lunar nodes (which I covered two issues ago, and in the second article down). It’s exactly square the nodes, which gives the event the feeling of an eclipse, or a point of no return.

The lunar nodes are aligned with two particularly meaningful points. The node in Sagittarius is pointing to the Galactic Core; hence, this Full Moon is square the core of our galaxy. This stirs up a spiritual crisis. To me the core represents our connection to Source, or our homing signal. The star that Planet Earth hangs out with is located 25,000 light years from the core — far out near the edge of the galaxy. And our star is located between two of the spiral arms. So we are in a distant, remote location, in the boondocks of the galaxy — and for this reason I am not surprised our particular planet so often has a ‘god forsaken’ feeling. The square between the Sun, the Moon and the Galactic Core suggests strongly that we have to seek inwardly for our spiritual connection. It also represents events that might provoke us to do that, and I would say if you have not noticed that fact yet, this is an awesome time to pay attention.

Remember that on our plane of reality, emotional impulses are binary: love and fear. Many have a hard time telling the difference. Here is a clue. If it does not feel like love, then it’s probably fear.

The ground crew of the B-29 “Enola Gay” which atom-bombed Hiroshima, Japan. Col. Paul W. Tibbets, the pilot, is in the center. Photographed on Mariana Islands in Guam. The entire Enola Gay’s flying crew on Aug. 6, 1945 consisted of 12 men. The plane was famously named after Colonel Tibbets’ mother. Photo: UPI.

The South Node, opposite the Galactic Core, is conjunct a point that keeps showing up again and again in charts. The point is at 28+ Gemini. This is a very strange spot in the zodiac that shows up prominently in the charts for Sept. 11, the Asian tsunami of 2004, WikiLeaks, two key charts for Japan — and then for the quake one week ago. These are events that involve the breakdown of systems, turning points in history and in one case someone who is working to tell the truth about those systems.

I happen to have the asteroid Beagle there, and I’ve been hunting this point like a hound for several years. Up till now I was aware that the connection could not be a ‘coincidence’ (I covered this in my first article on WikiLeaks, by the way). Now, this is not merely a point that appears in the charts for catastrophes; it comes with an odd kind of disaster that seems eerily out of place — and it’s also present in people or things that raise our awareness. For example, WikiLeaks just published memos that prove Japan knew it could have this problem years ago.

When I saw how involved it was in both the charts for Japan and the quake, that made me more curious. There is a fixed star at this point, called Betelgeuse. I knew this star was there but I never researched it. A friend looked into it this week, and she dug something out of a 17th century astrology textbook — no ordinary one, the first one ever published in English, called Christian Astrology by William Lilly. He associates the star with “rare engines of war.” That is a quote. Now, that is interesting, since at the time he wrote that there was no such thing as a jetliner or a skyscraper.

Checking Wikipedia next, we learned more. Betelgeuse is a red star, connected with Mars. “With the history of astronomy intimately associated with mythology and astrology prior to the scientific revolution, the red star, like the planet Mars that derives its name from a Roman war god, has been closely associated with the martial archetype of conquest for millennia, and by extension the motif of death and rebirth.” Notably this star is opposite the Galactic Core, facing toward intergalactic space. It feels that way.

The atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

Here is what I am thinking. As these global events come closer together, it’s starting to feel like someone is doing all of this. I got that feeling the strongest over the weekend pondering how this extremely rare quake — the 3rd most powerful on record — struck a region in Japan just where there are numerous nuclear reactors (including others not currently in distress). When I read the phrase rare engines of war, I suddenly felt like I was sitting in the middle of someone else’s war.

The question is: whose war, and over what? I don’t know, but I can tell you that the atom was not split for peaceful purposes. It was split with the intention of killing a lot of people. That much is history. Most wars are fought over the usual stupid reasons — power, greed and egotism. Heck, why not? The world is ending anyway.

Next, it occurred to me that this was a war in which environmental disasters were being used as weapons. When Friday’s quake happened, there were a spate of posts that went around about how the federal HAARP facility on the Alaskan tundra was turned up to full tilt at the time. I wasn’t in the control room taking pictures — I don’t know. But many people believe this is an electromagnetic device capable of changing weather patterns and inducing seemingly natural disasters. But this is not my field of inquiry; it was a little too tinfoil hat for me, that is, until I was looking at video of nuclear reactors blowing up one after the next.

So, I started asking around. I asked a friend who is an engineer if you can make an earthquake. He sent back a number of references, the most interesting of which was a quote from Bill Clinton’s secretary of defense, a guy named William S. Cohen, during a news briefing. The quote comes from the Department of Defense transcript of that briefing.

The atomic bombing of Nagasaki.

He said he had read about the prospect of “some scientists in their laboratories trying to devise certain types of pathogens that would be ethnic-specific so that they could just eliminate certain ethnic groups and races; and others are designing some sort of engineering, some sort of insects that can destroy specific crops. Others are engaging even in an eco- type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves” [emphasis mine].

Gee whiz: the very secretary of defense speaking, not some conspiracy (or astrology) website? And, um, like — others are doing this? Like who for instance?

Saddam Hussein? Castro? Russia? Darth Vader? Well, whoever.

When the United States is talkin’, it’s always someone else. We’re nobody special, just the only country ever to use the Bomb on a population. And we happen to have one of these electromagnetic wave thingies — a really big one and it keeps getting bigger. That would be HAARP. And this is not particularly new technology. Stuff like this was being developed by Nikola Tesla, an electrical engineer who was busy in the early 20th century. Tesla, who invented alternating current and thus the modern electrical grid, was ahead of his time. In 1897 he was researching cosmic rays.

I just looked at his chart. He has Mercury in that mysterious 28+ degree of Gemini: Mercury, the planet of the mind, of ideas and of messages. By the way — for what it’s worth — he was the biggest rival of Thomas Edison, the founder of GE — the company that designed those nuclear reactors that are melting down.

Thank you, that was all very interesting

— but at the moment we’re sitting here wondering what to do. Wondering what’s going to happen to all that radiation. Wondering if they’re going to get a grip. And the show is not over — far from it.

In addition to the 2012 configuration (Uranus square Pluto) I’ve been describing for weeks, there are many other aspects gathering around the Aries Point that I haven’t mentioned yet which hint at the possibility of a confrontation. These are about self-awareness awakening us to the forces of darkness that have, so far, kept themselves rather well cloaked. I mean, one definition of the perfect war is one that nobody knows is going on. It looks like something else.

In terms of how to process all this disaster by design, my own preference is to be aware rather than to pretend something is not happening. My preference is to stay connected and creative and curious rather than to pull away. I choose to embrace this moment with a sense of adventure rather than dread. This is a moment of collective awakening.

It may be the beginning of the very moment of collective awakening, here at the edge of the world.

I just have one question for you — what are you doing?

lovingly,

Additional Research: Tracy Delaney, Amanda Painter and Carol van Strum. Photo Research: Sarah Bissonette-Adler. Many readers have contributed ideas, facts and proofreading — thank you.

Waterfall at the Grandmother Land on Earth Day 2010. Photo by Eric Francis.

A Full Moon in Virgo: Turning a Corner

Saturday’s Full Moon in Virgo represents a turning point on many accounts, illustrated mainly because the axis of the Full Moon is square the nodes of the Moon. This is being called a ‘super’ Full Moon because the Moon is at perigee particularly close to the Earth. You can think of this as opposite Black Moon Lilith, the lunar apogee, or you can just think of it as large and close.

Full Moon chart set for Kingston, NY.

The Moon and Sun are also square a point out of a system of astrology we don’t usually use here — that point (a hypothetical, without an actual physical body but with a symbolic and mathematical presence) is called Hades, and it’s in late Gemini. This seems designed to help us become aware of anything that is “unpleasant, useless, antique or deeply buried,” in the words of Arlene Kramer, such as power generation inventions that don’t work and that we don’t need. Similarly in our own lives we might look for defenses, ways of relating to ourselves, ideas or concepts of dualism that no longer serve us.

Hades (not shown in the chart, but at 28+ Gemini) also represents the occult, and the secrets of the atomic world would clearly qualify, making any dark sorcerer proud — except for the fact that no sorcerer likes to see his spell run wild. Still, we need to go deeply into whatever it is that we encounter, make an authentic inquiry and check our basic facts. This is a slow-moving point covering just a degree a year, so it’s going to be hanging around that odd degree that binds together many of the biggest news events of the past decade.

Part of what makes this chart influential is the proximity to the lunar nodes. When the Sun and Moon are conjunct or close to either of the nodes, we usually get an eclipse. When they are square the nodes, there can be a similar sensation. This is an especially close square, coming in at less than one degree away, so this chart indicates both a turning point and an opposition one needs to integrate into one’s psyche in order to proceed with a growth process. That opposition might involve the emotional nature of Pisces and the mental nature of Virgo, an opposition which can cause significant struggle (as if the two have nothing in common).

The nodes themselves align with the Galactic Core — the North Node points right to it. There is an idea that we need to focus on the homing signal represented by the core of the galaxy — that irresistible pull toward the center of consciousness that might be at odds with the normal human experiences of feelings/thoughts and that can seem to exist on a different plane of reality. In fact it can seem so different that we pretend it’s not there, or get entirely distracted in the rest of the sensations we’re feeling. The intensity of this Full Moon suggests that the polarity between the male and female principles (illustrated by the Sun and Moon) becomes so intense that it dawns on the mind that there might be a better way.

This is also an Aries Point event; the Sun and the Moon are both close to Aries and Libra. The Sun is close to an exact conjunction to Uranus in Aries, which it will be through the equinox. This suggests something new; a new idea about oneself (Aries) or about where we fit into the community (Uranus). The world is not always based on the choices we perceived yesterday — often there are other alternatives that we can invoke, though they will take us on a seemingly narrower path.

For an interesting comment on the Full Moon chart, please visit this article on the Planet Waves blog.

Last chance to tell…

For three years, Mark Cocker, the author and conservationist, has been working with BirdLife on a massive and remarkable initiative that documents how birds fill our lives. Called Birds and People, the project is building an international chorus on just why birds are so important to people, how they resonate throughout human cultures, and how they influence our responses to wider nature and the environment.

Eagle Hunters crossing the Altai plateau in Mongolia (David Tipling).

Mark is now calling for more stories, and the next few months will be that last chance to contribute and get your personal experience into Birds and People.

Birds and People will be a unique book for many reasons, but particularly because it contains original contributions from people around the world. Already, the stories of more than 420 people are woven into Mark’s authoritative text — from Paraguay to Portugal, from India to Australia, Azerbaijan to the Bahamas. More than 60 countries are represented already.

Images for Birds and People are being gathered by renowned bird photographer David Tipling, who has already travelled widely seeking pictures. In these examples of his work, red-crowned cranes are trumpeting at dawn on Hokkaido in Japan (shown in link), and the Eagle Hunters are crossing the Altai plateau in Mongolia, en route to the Ulgii hunters festival in October 2009.

Uranus in Aries

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Dear Friend and Reader:

Later today (overnight Friday in some time zones), Uranus leaves Pisces and enters Aries to stay for the next seven years. As the astrology picture of 2012-2015 assembles, this is one of the biggest pieces — the presence of Uranus representing the energy surge; the impulse to enter the future. This has been warming up for a few years, but now is the moment we go into warp speed. In the words of Richard Tarnas, Uranus is Prometheus, the awakener.

The two sides of the planet Uranus, as viewed in this composite image, by the Keck II Telescope at near infrared wavelengths. These new images of the seventh planet from the sun promise to help scientists unravel the mysteries of the weather on Uranus. Photo credit: Courtesy Lawrence Sromovsky, UW-Madison Space Science and Engineering Center.

Bringing Uranus into such a prominent place as the first degree of the zodiac amplifies its influence, and Uranus is already pretty hot: its characteristics include fast, surprising developments; future-oriented thinking; moments of revolution; and shocking surges of awareness. As Uranus approaches its first exact square to Pluto in June 2012, we’re only going to see this whole process accelerate, bring in more communities and wake up more people. In a phrase, 2012 is about everything, all at once.

For some the awakening associated with this aspect will be extremely uncomfortable, challenging their old ways and pushing many out of their comfort zones. To do this astrology fully, it’s necessary either to challenge or break away from everyone who is not. For many, the developing energies will be the most exciting thing that’s ever happened, the moment of real involvement and participation. A lot of others will watch and shake their heads at how crazy the world is going. I reckon a good few will feel alienated and wish they could do more, having no idea how to.

Uranus in Aries actually began warming up its act last year, when Jupiter and Uranus briefly visited Aries and made a conjunction on June 8. That conjunction was in the first degree of Aries — the Aries Point itself, the first degree of the astrological wheel. The location of the conjunction was one of those clues that our personal lives and the seemingly inaccessible, usually abstract realm of public existence were going to merge rapidly and in a large way. We had a clue that the effects would be international — that was the presence of Jupiter. Sure enough, it has all happened.

I’ll tell you this, though. Whenever I write about politics, I’m fully aware that for most people their contact with government consists of parking tickets, filing taxes and possibly watching television (which is the new scholarship).

Handcuffs on the doors in the state capitol building attempt to lock out protesters. Photo by Robin Davies.

Most of us neither understand nor appreciate what happens in the wider society, and we’re pretty confused about it, too. How are we supposed to tell what’s important when there’s always a lot of action on TV? From what I could tell there were as many photographers outside Lindsay Lohan’s 10-minute hearing Thursday as there are in Madison, Wisconsin, where we have a revolution brewing. The fiasco at the Lohan court appearance (for a troubled rich girl attempting to steal an expensive necklace, to me representing all that’s wrong with the world) is part of a dumbing-down process that either creates distractions or makes us not care about what really matters.

It was fun watching Contessa Brewer on MSNBC Thursday afternoon get openly, vocally pissed off at her producer — talking through her earpiece — who informed her that she had to describe Lohan’s dress because people care. The obvious question is does anyone care, or are they brainwashed into thinking they care?

In Wisconsin, right now, we are witnessing a struggle over the future of the American labor movement, which is the only voice in politics large enough to compete with what can be understated as a right-wing corporatist movement: that is, banks and corporations taking over everything. Labor unions, which are traditionally very powerful in Wisconsin, are the backbone of the Democratic Party, the American equivalent of the Labor Party in other countries. When despotic right wing legislators want to gut the right of unions to exist, they’re saying they want all the marbles. And in a word, having all the marbles is tyranny.

When we look at the mess in politics (which primarily involves how sold out to corporate interests so many politicians are), any person with a shred of sensitivity will be repulsed; merely seeing the face of Scott Walker, the Tea Bagger puppet governor of Wisconsin (whose boss is a multi-billionaire oil and chemical guy from Texas), makes me a little nauseous. That, too, is part of the assault on common sense, empathy and humanity. What we’re witnessing in Wisconsin is supposed power that will stop at nothing. We are also witnessing an agenda. And we are seeing it everywhere, as an old concept of might makes right tries to hold on in a world that is about to deliver only change.

You may not have heard about this, but in Michigan, the state legislature is now passing a law that would allow the state government to enter a fiscally stressed municipality or school district, kick out the elected officials, take over — and strip union rights. Gee, what a coincidence.

Protesters in Madison carry a picture of Gov. Scott Walker as the masked man/bandit/sidekick a la Robin. Walker is a puppet of the Koch brothers, the oil and chemical billionaires from Texas who funded and helped create the Tea Party movement that swept a bunch of right-wing pseudo Republicans into office last November. People who voted for them in good faith are starting to realize they got duped. Photo by Robin Davies.

Other places, on seemingly less important matters, public officials are digging in their heels and pushing their will on people, lying to them, often successfully convincing them that they’re powerless and basically doing anything to convince themselves they actually have power over others. This seems to be on the level of sport; something done for its own sake. In my own city I’m involved in an issue and one of the most perverse things I’m seeing is certain members of the community gloat that they are getting over on others — or so they think.

One problem with having a politically illiterate population is that hardly anyone can see the larger agenda. In fact most would deny there even is one — that all this movement in, shall we say, certain political directions is kind of a coincidence. People who espouse most of Ronald Reagan’s views today would be considered liberals (they are not).

We here in the United States have put up with a lot during the past 30 years that the Neoconservative movement has been rising to power, and we have said so very little. There has been war after war, and giveback after giveback (civil rights, privacy, standard of living, reproductive rights). There was a fraudulent presidential impeachment, two stolen elections and a false-flag attack that has been used to justify anything anyone feels needs some justification.

The U.S. is sitting on $14 trillion in public debt (nearly all of which went into private hands) that our children will either pay back or default on. Just about all the manufacturing jobs have gone to Indonesia and Mexico and China. We have seen the treasury looted again and again. Banks that were bailed out and profitable are sitting on trillions that they won’t lend to businesses. Four hundred people have as much wealth as half the U.S. population.

There is a faction of American politics that will not be satisfied until every real job is shipped overseas, till everyone works at Wal Mart, till nobody has health care, and until women’s rights are gutted entirely. What we’re seeing in Wisconsin is, in two words, resistance to that agenda, and progress toward the new.

Police in Madison escort a protest march. Our reporter in Madison says that with rare exceptions, the cops have been extremely cool. Photo by Robin Davies.

Yet all of this can still seem so abstract. I ask you — why are so many people on antidepressants? Why do so many resort to fundamentalist religion? Why are so unbelievably many people drunk so often everywhere in the world? Why is there so much rage? Why are relationships so fragile? All of this relates to the political environment. Cause and effect are never separate; I cannot tell you which is causing which — but there are many connections.

In case you’re wondering about 2012, have a look around, and a look inside. Consider what is going on in your own life and see if you can discern a relationship to the wider world. That really is the exercise; at this moment, that’s one point of growth. Deeper in, there is, as I’ve suggested, a ubiquitous need for emotional healing that may affect every single person on the planet.

Meanwhile, outer circumstances keep getting our attention. Perhaps you have been, or will be, affected by a layoff, a foreclosure or a bank failure. You may have lost a loved one in one of these disgusting, illegal wars, which would certainly shape your worldview. You may personally be experiencing the effects of climate change.

Maybe your Social Security or disability will be cut because someone wants a new yacht, or holds in disdain those less ‘fortunate’ than themselves. You may be eating Corexit with your shrimp chow mein. Probably, though, your personal point of contact to the wider world will come in forms that differ slightly from someone you see interviewed on the news. (Then again, what you think of as the news may be coming to your town, your street or your living room any day.)

Some kind of a protest thingie in Madison that sums up the feeling of Uranus-Pluto aspects. Photo by Robin Davies.

Maybe you know you’ve contributed to the problem over and over by not speaking up every time you’ve known you wanted to; every time you saw injustice — on whatever scale, including right in front of you — but decided you were powerless or that you didn’t want to bother. I promise you it’s not too late to care, and to take action on whatever level feels right. One thing that will make this easier is that others around you will be getting involved. You won’t need to feel like you’re the only one who cares.

For most people, the revolutionary surge of Uranus square Pluto — the epicenter of 2012 astrology — will arise as a sense of restlessness, as the awakening of conscience, as the desire to influence the world in a creative way. Maybe that, in turn, will be about growing into some of the potential you keep feeling, that keeps calling you, begging you to respond. You may wake up one day and decide the truth really does matter: on whatever level you take that concept. Apparently the people of Wisconsin heard the wake-up call.

“I never thought I’d be covering a pro-democracy movement in the United States, much less in my city,” said Elizabeth DiNovella, an editor for The Progressive. “I think people here really have this awareness of how money has spoiled politics. Even today a lot of people at the protest were chanting, ‘The banks got bailed out; the people got sold out’.”

The protests by far have been some of the most vibrant and sustained in the United States since the 1960s, with tens of thousands of people in the streets day after day, and an occupation of the capitol lasting for three weeks.

Warm and sunny in Madison, WI? Fox News shows scene of police and protesters scuffling, claiming that it’s in Madison, WI. The only problem is that it’s warm, sunny and there are palm trees. The footage was shown in a segment with Bill O’Reilly whining about how people say Fox News is lying about the protests. The palm trees were spotted by some of those professional leftists who of course have a keen eye for trees.

DiNovella said that the whole experience has taught people a lot. “The propaganda of the right no longer works on the people of Wisconsin. People are aware of what’s going on and they recognize that something is wrong.” She gave as one example how Fox News, during a rant about how the protests were being staged by “professional leftists,” showed footage of violence at a union-related protest purportedly in Madison. The problem was that there were palm trees in the frame.

“Now people are carrying inflatable palm trees at protests,” she said. “The energy here has been so positive and people have been so creative.”

DiNovella has helped with protest movements in many parts of the world. “I’m so glad I didn’t have to build a low-power radio station. Compared to other places, we already have the infrastructure.” She said that recently the pipefitters union gave away 14,000 bratwurst and hot dogs, feeding hungry protesters — many of whom have spent days on end out in the cold.

“Wisconsin has its own progressive tradition, especially involving unions, that is part of the American fabric. It’s funny watching these reporters coming in from out of town who are surprised that this could happen here, including in the independent media,” she added.

Uranus square Pluto is not just about addressing external oppression. It’s also about an inner revolution over dark mother and dark father: the oppressive forces that we’ve internalized over the years, and from which we seek freedom. It’s about breaking free from the structures that merely eat energy and feed negativity. Revolution is about getting out from under the shadow of the past, from guilt, and from the urge to suppress every creative or erotic or loving impulse you feel. Revolution is about figuring out you’re actually alive, and doing something about it.

Yours & truly,

Tsunami waves in Japan earlier today. Photo: Reuters.

Biggest Quake in 140 Years Hits Japan at 8.9;

Tsunami Warning Issued for 20 Countries including U.S

Uranus in Pisces is certainly going out with a bang. It’s been rippling through the political spheres for weeks. Today a magnitude 8.9 earthquake struck near the city of Sendai, just north of Tokyo on the northeastern coast of Japan. This is being called the most powerful quake to strike Japan in 140 years. A debris-filled wall of water as high as 30 feet has washed over some cities and farmland.

Chart for quake off the coast of Sendai, with the coordinates corrected for the actual location off the coast. Note the packed 8th house, including Chiron, Mars, the Sun, the Black Moon Lilith, Mercury and other points in Pisces (the 8th house by whole sign houses). Centaur Nessus is prominent in this chart — it’s angular on the 7th house cusp.

There are no known death tolls at this time; it’s impossible to estimate so early in the situation. One witness said the quake was so intense that it was impossible for him to stand up. First he and his wife clung to the outside of their house, then they had to curl up on the ground. Major aftershocks are expected. Train lines are down in Tokyo, a city of 13 million, and highways are closed. The quake happened in the mid-afternoon local time, with many people away from home and children in daycare centers.

Witnesses say this was an unusually long quake, with tremors lasting several minutes. It’s being called the 5th largest quake in the world since 1900, rivaling the Chile quake in 1960, Prince William Sound, Alaska in 1964 and the Sumatra quake of 2004. Remember that the Richter scale, used to measure quakes, is logarithmic; a 5.0 quake is 10 times more intense than a 4.0 quake. This increases proportionally as you go up the scale such that the energy increase from 8.0 to 9.0 is much greater than from 4.0 to 5.0.

There are four nuclear power plants in the area. CNN is reporting that one of the plants has a fire and one has a shutdown of the cooling system. CNN is also reporting that the International Atomic Energy Agency has said that the plants where shut down safely, so this is a potentially conflicting report.

Tsunamis have already reached Taiwan, and warnings are out for as far away as Hawaii, the entire West Coast of the United States and Canada, and coastal Chile. But only small waves are expected in these outlying areas. Due to the prevalence of video cameras, there are astonishing videos of both the quake and the waves in Japan. CNN is reporting that there are evacuations underway in coastal areas of Hawaii. Images of piles cars sitting in a harbor, an explosion at a refinery and other vivid images of devastation are being broadcast on television.

These are the planets on a 90-degree dial aligned approximately with the Mars-Borasisi conjunction. In other words these are the points that are conjunct, square or opposite the conjunction.

Let’s take a look at the chart. We see a powerful 8th house in Pisces — with Chiron, Mars, Black Moon Lilith and Uranus present. Sometimes astrological symbolism can be glaringly literal; the 8th is the house of the ’cause of death’ and here we have many planets involved with a water sign, including three of the higher-impact ones — Mars, Chiron and Uranus. With Uranus just 3 arc minutes from Aries (where it arrives later today), this is an Aries Point event. Such a potent 8th house speaks to the possibility of both loss of life and economic impact. There is a lot of concentrated wealth and industry in this part of Japan, so the impact is being felt in markets and will be experienced by the insurance and reinsurance industries. (Reinsurance is an insurance policy held by an insurance company.)

The ascendant for the Japan chart comes up arc minutes from the degree of the total solar eclipse of Aug. 11, 1999 — demonstrating that eclipses can be active for many years after the event. This eclipse was also present in the Sept. 11, 2001 chart — Venus, the chart ruler was there.

In addition, the Moon’s South Node in the Japan chart, as mentioned in last week’s edition, is now in Gemini and in this chart is conjunct the Moon’s position in both the Sept. 11 chart and the Banda Aceh chart. The prevalence of this degree in global-scale disasters is pretty weird; I covered it in a recent article on Wikileaks.

The Moon phase is first quarter, which is unusual for such a large quake; they happen more often at new and full phase. The Moon had just entered Gemini and was in a close square to Chiron at the time. Last week we read about Borasisi; at the moment of the quake, Mars was (and remains for the moment) in a close conjunction to Borasisi.

Both points are square the Great Attractor, which is a force that magnifies the influence of whatever comes in contact with it and is associated with far-reaching effects extending beyond what can be readily perceived. Looking at a list of minor planets, we see the a concentration in the mutable signs around Mars-Borasisi, including Hopi, something that speaks of events with a rapid onset. One description of the quake that I heard a little while ago included the unusual sound of thousands of buildings creaking simultaneously. The asteroid Siwa, right in the mix (opposite the Great Attractor), is associated with sound.

Weekly Horoscope for Friday, March 11, 2011, #852 – BY ERIC FRANCIS

Eric’s Zodiac Sign Descriptions

Aries (March 20-April 19) — Self is not static. Indeed, it’s about the most dynamic element in nature. It would help if we could distinguish self-concept from self. The thing that tends to get stuck is our idea of who we’re supposed to be, which has some relationship to who we were yesterday. I don’t suggest you get lost in the theory of this, except to remember that what tends to seize is an idea and what tends to flow is your actual being. With Uranus entering your sign today, you can pretty much forget the past and get ready for some nonstop motion. It will help if you allow your idea to be free, so that when the actual person you are finds itself in the midst of sudden progress, you can minimize inner conflict and go with the flow of existence. You’re unlikely to have any choice in the matter of whether your life takes some giant steps, though you have plenty of influence over what direction you choose.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Aries, please go to this link.

Taurus (April 19-May 20) — To the extent that this is a moment of inner awakening for you, it’s also a moment of seeing what you’ve been missing. You’re being presented with an inner view that may be shocking, strange or feel like something to celebrate. It will help if you remember that what you’re experiencing is indeed an inner experience. Most of the people you meet every day have neither affinity for nor attraction to this thing sometimes called an inner life. If they do it’s often dressed in the garb of outer life: situations, personalities, physical objects, goals, etc. There is another inner life that is attached to none of those symbols. You could think of it as the clear essence of being; as pure energy; as your sense of presence within the universe. It’s what we think of as ‘alive’ the moment that concept has any meaning at all. To experience that on our planet at this time can be pretty shocking.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Taurus, please go to this link.

Gemini (May 20-June 21) — One good idea will lead to the next. One interesting encounter will point the way to the next, and the two are related. You’re being invited to feed your imagination on people: on their presence, what they say, and those to whom they introduce you. But don’t wait around for that; don’t be shy. Make your presence known, and pay attention to your environment. You’re in an unusual space where your circle of friends is growing outward and reaching into unfamiliar social patterns. People you never would have expected are positioned to reach toward you. One thing you might notice is that you’re no longer the weirdest person in your environment. Indeed, you may think you have some competition, but fortunately your life is more about collaboration than contest. If you keep that perspective you’re likely to make some very good friends over the next few days.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Gemini, please go to this link.

Cancer (June 21-July 22) — This is a particularly brilliant moment for your professional life. Do your best to set aside the sensation of ‘too much’ and put your intelligence to work making the most of the volume of events and of energy flow. Then open your mind to some of the possibilities that you actually have considered but have never quite given yourself credit for being up to. At the moment, just about everyone else thinks you are. You don’t need to do much except get out of your own way and not send yourself your usual litany of negative or questioning messages. Cancer is a yin (feminine, receptive) sign by nature; you are now embarking on one of the most yang phases of your life: a time of expression and what looks like wild innovation and creativity. The most important thing you can do is stay emotionally grounded: not stuck, but present in your feelings, even as they move at their unusual current pace.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Cancer, please go to this link.

Leo (July 22-Aug. 23) — As the next few days unfold, feel yourself approach a tipping point in a financial or partnership situation. This is a moment when the balance of inertia shifts toward being a thing in motion rather than a thing at rest; toward clarity rather than the soupy fog that has enveloped some aspects of your life; toward the future rather than lingering in the past. A doorway is opening for you, and it’s opening a lot wider and into a more interesting space than you may realize at the moment. You may feel like your horizons are widening, but what is really expanding is your idea of who you are and what you’re doing in the world. When that particular perspective takes on its full dimensions, the world itself seems to change. Remember, and remember again: it’s you who is bursting into full color. The world has always been this wild.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Leo, please go to this link.

Virgo (Aug. 23-Sep. 22) — I’m here to remind you once again that everything is negotiable. I know that hardly anyone lives this way except for a few billionaires and con artists, but I’m telling you that — with rare exceptions, which probably have many exceptions — everything is up for discussion. That includes every agreement or commitment you ever made; every seemingly intractable situation; your entire concept of your finances; and the way you project yourself into the world and seek identity in the people that you meet. How they see and experience you is entirely up for grabs, and you get to set the terms of the discussion. One last — you’re not alone. There’s that old song that says two is the loneliest number, after one. This moment is your opening to meeting many kindred spirits, as long as you are authentically, unequivocally yourself.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Virgo, please go to this link.

Libra (Sep. 22-Oct. 23) — You’re being a gem with someone you work with who may be getting on your nerves or going through a difficult emotional time. You have a way of channeling your energy into creative directions, which really is the name of the game. And you actually have a life. Yes, there may be a lot of movement, unpredictable developments and perhaps a bit more energy than you would prefer, but in actual fact you have a rich existence and I think you know it. That provides you with both reassurance and a cushion. But I suggest you stay as far outside of your safe zone as you can, because that’s where you’ll find your maximum creativity. You tend to like stability and you’re thriving on it at the moment; events may seem to conspire to draw you out of your comfort zone and into what may feel like an entirely unfamiliar place. The way your chart is set up at the moment, you can have both.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Libra, please go to this link.

Scorpio (Oct. 23-Nov. 22) — You may have to assert yourself against someone close to you. This person’s reluctance to speak up, live up to a commitment or respond to your needs has been a cause for concern. I would caution you against exerting too much energy their way; a little is all it will take. There are many other influences that are sending the same message in his or her life, and I assure you that this person feels like they’re in a bit over their head. There are aspects to their life that you don’t know about yet. I would not go so far as to say that they’re actually living a double life, but there is likely to be an element of that. Because of your proximity, you’re likely to be someone to whom they respond. So I suggest you make your feelings known in the form of a direct request rather than a hint of some kind, and then listen to what you hear. Leave the door open.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Scorpio, please go to this link.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22-Dec. 22) — Many things exist in potential: talent, ideas and your ability to project yourself into your goals. What makes the difference is action, and on that particular score I can give you a clue: you may never quite feel ready for what you want to do, or what you plan to do. You may never meet all the prerequisites, have enough knowledge or be certain enough. And you know what? That doesn’t matter. You’re not exactly unprepared at this point; in fact you have far more experience than you think, and that experience is worth more than you imagine. Still, you may think that makes little difference when you don’t have the certainty or the confidence that you need. It’s true that some of the most worthwhile accomplishments in the long story of humanity have happened when they were good and ready. Most of them seized the lives of people who had little preparation and no idea what they were getting into.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Sagittarius, please go to this link.

Capricorn (Dec. 22-Jan. 20) — Your astrology offers several different images for what might be coming. One is you transform your basement into a laboratory and start working on those inventions you’ve been planning all these years. Or, the Cirque du Soleil arrives in town and you’re the host to the fire-eaters and sword swallowers, who stay for at least three weeks; while they’re living with you, they teach you all their tricks and you join their troupe and go on the road for seven years. Or you buy an old summer camp in your area and found a special program for child prodigies. In any event, expect some new energy to come into your home; reconsider what it means to feel safe in a time of rapid change. At the very least, consider redecorating, remodeling or moving to bigger digs. And if you currently live with your family, get ready to consider some much better options.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Capricorn, please go to this link.

Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb. 19) — Having the life you want is suddenly no longer a matter of power or resources; it’s a matter of people, and you’re person one. Normally we think of success as being upwardly mobile; for you it’s more about being able to extend yourself among your peers. You practice a kind of lateral success, which is another way of saying weaving community. You may have a sense that you’re at the center of that community, but that’s only true from a limited perspective. You’re participating in a much wider cosmic project of re-weaving the human family. I am sure you’ve noticed how fragmented our communities are and how alienated so many people feel. I promise you, you’re one of the people who feels less estranged. That’s a special distinction. And you don’t have to let on. Just keep weaving.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Aquarius, please go to this link.

Pisces (Feb. 19-March 20) — With everything else going on in your sign (and thus your life), you might not notice that Uranus is slipping into Aries this week, ending a seven-year spell of rampant whatever-it-is that you’re probably sure is not over. However, I have a question: Have you ever had one of those revelations wherein you realize the one thing you need to do is relax, cease from exerting so much effort and energy, and allow ‘pure mind’ to get your results? That is, to allow consciousness to be the potent activating agent that it is, and then experience the universe responding in its quantum way? I thought so! Well, it may take you a few weeks to get there. You can start by making the conscious choice to gear down, even if your life doesn’t respond in 10 seconds. Obviously many things would be easier if you had no concerns about where money was supposed to come from, and if one aspect of life is poised to respond to the whole quantum mind-power thing, that’s the one that’s gonna happen first.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Pisces, please go to this link.

With Love From Borasisi

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Dear Friend and Reader:

Anyone who works with ideas in a public forum figures out sooner or later that most people will believe anything, particularly if it’s not true. I’ve learned as much from writing satire as I have from writing about astrology or being an investigative reporter. I’ve noticed that many readers will readily accept something cut from the whole cloth of fiction, no matter how absurd, as long as it looks sort of good. There seems to be this crack in consciousness through which very nearly anything can go.

Seven Deadly Sins window curtain in the bathroom of Taco Juan’s, where I write many of my articles and horoscopes. The owner is actually named Bobby — he’s a dyed-in-the wool Scorpio with a sense of humor to match. And great tacos. Photo by Eric.

Those whose intentions are more sinister than humorous will easily convince most of us that Al Qaeda is under the lid of every trash can and that Saddam Hussein has nuclear bombs he’s ready to use on us. You could look at this as a complex process involving many layers of psychology and incestuous relationships between the media, the government and the companies that profit from war; or you can look to that odd little property of consciousness where if you repeat something often enough, people tend to think it’s true — especially if they’re scared.

This also works with loving intentions. I like to play a game based on this theory with dogs. When I meet a dog for the first time, I’m a stranger. We sniff one another and get acquainted. When I meet the dog again 15 minutes later, we’re old friends. People are not that different. Familiarity breeds trust. More than looking for reasons to be suspicious, I think that most people are actually looking for reasons to trust and will take any opportunity. Con artists, drug manufacturers and politicians know this, and exploit it happily.

Pisces New Moon and a New Planet For You

Today is the Pisces New Moon. It’s exact at about 3:46 pm EST (12:46 pm in California, 8:46 pm in London and early Saturday morning in Oz). Usually, the Moon and Sun make a conjunction in Pisces just once a year, and this is the one. It’s also the last New Moon of the astrological year; we’re just two weeks from equinox, and a pretty hot equinox at that.

There’s a lot of action in Pisces right now: Chiron has recently arrived, beginning an eight-year trek; Uranus is about to make its final exit after seven years on March 11; and we have more transient visitors, with Mercury and Mars present at the moment.

Religion makes a lot more sense when portrayed in science fiction. Bokononism in Cat’s Cradle is one well-done example. So is the Church of the Second Chance in the Riverworld series by Philip Jose Farmer, a story wherein a whole bunch of people are trying to figure out how and why they all reincarnated on a huge planet along the banks of a river. The first book in that series is To Your Scattered Bodies Go. Photo taken on Route 28 in Ulster County (the road to Woodstock) by Eric Francis.

There’s a longterm visitor I haven’t mentioned much — an outer planet discovered in 1999, called Borasisi. This friendly bit of ice and rock is located out in the Kuiper Belt, a region of space that was first discovered when Pluto made its arrival in 1930. Nobody knew it was the Kuiper Belt at the time; that wasn’t confirmed until 1992, when Jane X. Luu co-discovered something called 1992 QB1 and we had evidence that Pluto was not alone.

Pluto has an orbit of 248 years, as do many other small planets orbiting our Sun (known as Plutinos); 1992 QB1 has an orbit of 289 years, which puts it in a slightly different class (classical Kuiper Belt objects). One interesting thing about QB1 is that despite having its orbit confirmed and being assigned a minor planet number (15760), it hasn’t been named by its discoverers. (I’ve proposed Radharani, a name for the supreme goddess of Hinduism. I propose that she offers an alternate concept to the death and transformation that we typically get from Pluto.)

Five years later, two of the same astronomers discovered Borasisi in the same region of space. Traditionally the discoverer(s) get to name what they find, and they chose to name this one after something from a science fiction novel called Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut.

This is unusual. Under naming guidelines, planets in this class are named for gods of creation or resurrection. Borasisi is a name for the Sun in the fictional religion central to Cat’s Cradle — Bokononism. In the novel, the Moon is known as Pabu, and the binary companion of Borasisi has been given that name.

Astrologically, to understand Borasisi we need to look to Cat’s Cradle, a wonderfully complex novel that addresses the themes of truth and lies, and technology and religion. One theme is that technology without conscience is very dangerous — a central theme of our lives. At the center of the story is what Vonnegut described as a whiz-bang sci-fi device: a substance called Ice Nine, water that is frozen and stable at room temperature. It’s a crystal that can teach any water with which it comes in contact to be frozen and stable at room temperature — including ocean water. If you eat just a speck, you turn into Ice Nine.

Is the Ouija board real, or is it a crock? It’s sold as a game — but we all have our stories. I have been researching the history of the word ‘compersion’ and I have learned that it came out of a Ouija board. Photo by Eric Francis.

Vonnegut got the idea when he was working as a PR man at General Electric in Schenectady. The concept came from a GE scientist who had the job of entertaining H.G. Wells (author of The Time Machine and The Invisible Man) when he visited GE’s labs one day. Wells didn’t do anything with the idea; many years later, Vonnegut did.

As someone who has covered GE’s escapades for many years, I cannot think of a more apt metaphor than Ice Nine to describe the company’s products or its lack of conscience. I am familiar with PCBs, which were the Big Deal — as in miracle of modern science — at the time that Vonnegut was in the PR department. These highly persistent toxins spread through the environment and the food chain, but the problem is you cannot dilute them. No matter how low the concentration, they still have a biological effect, and then, wherever they end up no matter how small the concentration, they move right up the food chain and concentrate again.

PCBs are scary. They are described in the press as ‘potential carcinogens’, which is extremely polite of them. They are hormonally active, toxic to DNA, immune suppressing and yes, carcinogenic. But I’ll tell you a secret. If I were to call up the GE public relations department right now and say, “Hello, I’m a reporter. Are PCBs toxic?” they would fax back a press release that says they’re no more toxic than table salt. That is GE, and this attitude — along with all the lies connected to the atomic bomb — is what propelled Vonnegut to write Cat’s Cradle. He says so in this interview.

One of his comments is that science is supposedly interested in pursuing ‘the truth’, but doesn’t care what happens with the results of its discoveries. In the interview, he gives the example that ‘the truth’ is what exploded over Hiroshima.

Lies of Religion, Truth of Science

While Cat’s Cradle addresses the damage caused by technology’s pursuit of ‘scientific truth’, there is a deeply personal dimension, which Vonnegut addresses in the religion of Bokononism.

While GE was telling us how we could get 10 hours of comfy cool breeze for the price of an ice cream cone, the company was busy installing an electrical grid insulated with chemicals called PCBs, which sickened many, polluted the Earth’s entire environment (up to the Arctic) and caused countless billions of dollars in damage.

Bokonon is a god who lives among his people. There is a Book of Bokonon, of which the first line is, “All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.” So it’s a ‘truthful’ religion in that it admits that it’s totally a lie; then it goes on to make up even more lies, designed to make its adherents feel better about their horrid existence.

This is a satire on the religions of the world that offer stories we are told, then which we tell ourselves, that make us feel better. You know, how Jesus died for our sins and how we have our little place in heaven and the Lord delivered the Jews from Egypt and all the animals visiting Buddha under a tree and this guy Arjuna being driven around in a chariot.

These are not usually understood to be stories or allegories; they are taken by most religious people, and taught to kids, as the actual truth, as God’s actual word and as infallible law. In fact they are nothing of the kind. Indeed they are usually hooked into a deeper layer of social psychology designed to do little other than get control of people who would be too scary to those in power if they could actually think independently. Almost every organized religion systematically oppresses women. Nearly every religion is used, at one time or another, as an excuse to go out and kill a lot of people. In fact, the day he ordered the bombing of Hiroshima, Harry Truman got on the radio and said that God told him to do it. Then they tell us that God is love.

Perhaps you’ve noticed that nearly all religion is rooted in the fear of death. There would be no use for religion if people were not scared of what happens after this existence seems to end, and then religion comes along and fills up the whole question with all kinds of stories and theories and things you’re supposed to do in order to go to heaven, be forgiven for sins you’re accused of (by religion), or be loved by God (who is available only from religion).

Vonnegut challenges his readers with the idea that these lies are actually fairly harmless contrasted to the ‘truths’ of science. He’s not exactly offering any commendations to either, just showing us the contrast. The lies lead to people being temporarily happier. Truths lead to mushroom clouds and Superfund sites so large nobody knows how large (such as GE’s contamination of the Hudson estuary system, which killed off fishing as far as the Long Island Sound).

But speaking of the Hudson, no amount of contamination could stop the 21st Annual Shad Festival, which is sponsored by none other than Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Hudson Riverkeeper. Just keep eating those fish if you want some evidence that the river is perfectly clean.

Sweet Little White Lies — and the Core Delusion

People tend to tell small lies for a few reasons. One is convenience, such as to smooth over the social environment. In order to avoid conflict, which most people don’t like, we are allowed to lie enough to camouflage our missteps or potentially offensive acts. It’s also convenient to believe that a drug is safe or that food is clean or that a politician is honest. Everything will probably be fine, right? As for politicians, for most of them, up until March 4, 2011, lying has been merely a way of life.

It seems like you can’t have a cat food ad these days where the kitty isn’t on LSD. Advertising is full of the lies that we think make us feel good. It is the core Bokononism of our day.

Another is most people tend to lack the courage to tell the truth, or to hear it. It takes some guts to say what you really think and feel. And it takes some courage to call out someone you know is lying to you. Many people will live with a lover or spouse having an affair for years, with both parties ‘pretending it’s not happening’. So we live with a diversity of lies that simply go over the top of the maximum courage we can usually muster up.

Finally, people lie to keep a sense of control that they don’t have in real life. According to one of my grad school professors at Rutgers, James Joyce once said somewhere that he couldn’t understand why everyone doesn’t want to be a writer, because you get to play god in your own little universe. Lying, which means making up stories, is a form of playing god.

The actual events of the world we cannot control; fiction we can control. Some people enjoy (or are addicted to) lying simply because it gives them a sense of power in a world where they feel they have none. If you haven’t achieved much, you can make up a resume or tell a story of accomplishment to someone on a first date. In this sense, lies can also fulfill the expectation of what we’re ‘supposed to be’, which is itself a lie. If you do a little therapy or a little homework, you can figure out what these lies are, who told them to you and what effect they’re having. Those are the first steps toward growing up and moving on.

To science, homeopathic remedies are a dose of absolutely nothing (unless you study them with nuclear magnetic resonance). To a homeopath, they are a potentized, nontoxic form of the original substance. Stock photo image.

The thing about lies is that they work two ways. Like dioxin (which is a kind of lie that circulates in our endocrine systems, and which is another product of GE) the receptor is as important as the chemical. Those who want to see accurately will sooner or later do so. Those who are committed to being deceived will be deceived till they change their mind about that. And those who get by on telling themselves lies about existence — and to some extent, we all do — we can do that as long as it’s convenient.

Here is the problem, though. This state of deceived/deceiving is a root of many, if not all, diseases. This works on the physical level (dioxin, as mentioned, is the great deceiver of the endocrine system, sending all kinds of weird messages) and it works on the energetic level. What we withhold, and refuse to reveal, can make us energetically sick, and that can make us physically sick. Deception, particularly self-deception, can and does keep us ‘trapped’ in situations that make us sick. Many healing processes begin with admitting the truth to ourselves or our loved ones.

This is why homeopathy, a branch of medicine I mentioned recently, is so concerned with identifying what some call the core delusion. It’s necessary to locate that place where people hold their deepest self-deception or mistaken belief so that the root of disease can be addressed. You don’t need homeopathy to do this; you just need some awareness and willingness to grow. One thing my favorite homeopath, Rajan Sankaran, suggests is that one clue to delusions can be found in one’s sense of humor (and I would add, lack thereof). As a writer who thrives on satire, I am familiar with this — the first place I go in doing a parody designed to unravel an injustice is straight into the delusion, and turn the thing inside out with a little joke. If you’re wondering how to apply this to your life or your healing process, I would start with considering what you cannot laugh about in yourself. That probably points to a hangup you would feel better if you addressed.

As for Borasisi

Now we have a planet that addresses this thematic matter. It’s fitting that Borasisi is a longterm resident of Pisces in our era — the sign of delusions and illusions, as well as beauty and creativity. This gives us an opportunity to see this territory for what it is. We have the power of consciousness to distinguish truth, lies and stories. Where we might have made up lies, we can also make up a story or tell the truth. There is plenty of strength in that moment of choice. I think what Vonnegut is saying is that the real distinguishing factor is the motive. What I am suggesting is that the distinguishing factor is integrity.

Chart for the Pisces New Moon set for Kingston, NY. The chart has a cluster of planets across Aquarius and Pisces. Uranus is about to leave Pisces. Neptune is about to enter. So we can look for changes in the whole field of reality expressed by Pisces. The deeper question is: how does astrology work? Skeptics are correct in saying that it’s an elaborate web of lies, but that critique lacks the very imagination by which we actually succeed at creating our lives.

When a potent lunation happens very close to a newly discovered point, we get a kind of ‘proving’ (by which I mean demonstration) of some of the implications of that point. I would note that Donald Rumsfeld is out on the media circuit making up stories about his made-up stories about why we are (still) at war in Iraq. We can also take a look at the films that are currently showing or are about to come out right around now for additional information. There’s one I keep seeing an ad for about all those guys chasing this other guy because they’re in charge of his destiny. And I keep thinking, that’s a heck of a lot of work. Anything with a theme of illusion, deception or image is fair game for consideration.

We can look to our relationships, and see the investment we have in being perceived a certain way because we have a certain partner; or how we want our partner to perceive us. One of my photo models this week used the term ‘honest woman’ to describe herself, as someone who is too modest to admit how much she likes sex. She is deeply invested in that image (meanwhile it’s a challenge to look at her and not think of sex). Many people want to be perceived as a good boy, even though they might be a criminal. This is a theme of Borasisi: the lies we tell ourselves in order to feel better. Yet remember, most of those ‘necessary’ lies are the result of guilt, which is an artificial toxic contaminant created by the industry of religion — particularly where sex and relationship values are concerned.

There is another dimension of Borasisi that I’ll get into another time, which involves nothingness. My friend and co-planetary delineator Tracy Delaney reminds me this is considered “to be the highest ‘spiritual truth’ of what we are, e.g., in Buddhism. So we perhaps have a cosmic equivalent of The Fool here — the zero that can be first or last, deeply ignorant or enlightened.” She notes that science vs. religion is “a false dichotomy. You can’t fight nothingness; you can’t fight something that has no opposite, which is why spirit is invincible.” These are the kinds of ideas she connects with Borasisi. We have scientific ‘truths’ of our era that suggest that a vacuum is not empty and atoms are not solid, which have implications for how we think and relate to existence.

Detail of the Pisces New Moon. Borasisi is not shown; it’s at 12+ Pisces, about one degree from the Sun and Moon.

Friday’s New Moon is square a thing called the Great Attractor. It would take another thousand words to describe that — I will point you to my audio from earlier in the week, which tells the story. To sum up: the connection from the New Moon to this high-potency point in Sagittarius is about the intersection not only of two belief systems (such as science and religion) but of two entirely different orders of reality. And that intersection contains a whole lot of energy.

We have a lot of action developing in Pisces right now. Chiron has just entered this sign, which is pulling things into focus — things many people would rather not see, or have seen about themselves. As I write on Thursday, the Moon is conjunct Chiron. Uranus is about to make its exit, which is going to shift the whole vibrational field of Pisces, if you believe that even exists, and in a little while Neptune is about to dip in.

To me, Chiron provides the most clarification of what the whole Borasisi thing is about: Chiron is insisting that we get some clarity here in the world of maya. Notably, Chiron makes a conjunction to Borasisi in Pisces between 2014 and 2016. For those two years we will have a gradual merging of those energy fields, calling us to be clear about what we say and why we say it. It will be interesting to go back through history and look at the conjunctions, and see what they tell us. Here is a list, programmed by Tracy. (Gee f*cking whiz, the creation of the U.S. Constitution comes up as one of the very few dates listed.)

There is something in Borasisi about the use of creativity and narrative for constructive manifestation. There is also something about the conscious use of interpretation as a means of improving our lives. An entity named Abraham I am fond of suggests that we keep telling ourselves better and better stories about who we are and what we’re capable of — and eventually they will come true.

Yours & truly,

PS, Here is a poem for you: The Good Go Down by Marge Piercy (my reading).

Rahu, Ketu Change Signs (or, Cause and Effect are Never Separate)

The Lunar Nodes changed signs yesterday, from Cancer/Capricorn to Gemini/Sagittarius. Many astrology students consider the nodes so difficult to interpret they don’t bother. While I don’t have the bandwidth available today to do a full treatment, you’ve read about them every time I write about eclipses. The nodes and eclipses are directly linked; where the nodes go, eclipses follow — approximately. The nodes therefore have an eclipse effect all year long, even though eclipses are concentrated into intense periods that occur twice a year.

If you’re paying attention you noticed that the nodes changed signs backwards. The overall direction of the lunar nodes is retrograde. They have brief intervals of direct motion, but calculating their position is a matter of mathematical theory. As I understand it, the nodes represent a hypothetical point of intersection where the Moon would contact the ecliptic if it were there at that moment. When an eclipse happens, it’s usually anywhere from two to 15 degrees away from the nearest node. That is why I say it’s a theoretical thing.

The old time Vedic loremasters associated the lunar nodes with a dragon — and our past lives. Dragons usually look a little grumpier than they actually are. They have seen so much and the world seems a bit old and worn out to them. But they’re always looking for an adventure and love making new friends. Digital art by Kaek.

The nodes take about 18 months to go through a sign. The full cycle is about 18 years. But every nine years, they are in their reversed position; that is, about nine years ago, the nodes were in Gemini and Sagittarius, but in the opposite direction, with the North Node in Gemini and the South Node in Sagittarius. They always travel in an exact opposition. The direction of the Mean Node is an average; it is always retrograde. The direction of the True Node switches between retrograde and direct, but the overall direction is retrograde.

The nodes have a life of their own; they are interpreted differently than eclipses and nearly every description of their meaning that I’ve read omits any discussion of eclipses — something that has always struck me as weird. It’s not that eclipses are involved in the whole interpretation; but they do have a connection, and the presence of an eclipse emphasizes the node, draws on its influence. In an article I wrote many years ago, I describe them as ‘a different kind of thing’ — made of nothing, but seeming to be emanating a lot of something — information, energy, tendencies, needs, habits.

The nodes are connected to our concepts of the past and the future, which translates more to the distant past and what we do now that creates the future. In a natal chart, the South Node or Ketu (sometimes called the Dragon’s Tail) seems to show tendencies that in some astrological systems are associated with the results of actions we took and things we learned before we arrived in this incarnation. Ketu is often associated with ‘past lives’, though I think that only an approximate reading is possible, most of the time. We need other data to refine that, and if you must know, there are a heck of a lot of past lives to consider. Humans seem to take a while to wake up. So in most readings, Ketu will more tend to represent a general tendency in this lifetime of what we are comfortable with or depend on, perhaps a bit too much. Some call this karma.

The North Node is about pressing into the unfamiliar. It is about the action we are drawn to take and might be hesitant about; it represents a potentially unfamiliar point of consciousness, or somewhere we need to go. It is about the actions we can take now that point us to what we are creating in the future. The North Node represents the future that begins now. The South Node represents the past that began a moment ago, and which goes all the way back. The thing about reading your nodes is that once you figure out what is going on, it seems brutally obvious and you might wonder how you missed it all along.

This is the chart for the true node changing signs on Thursday. The direction of the mean node pair is always reverse, as it represents an average. The direction of the true node pair is overall retrograde, with brief intervals of direct motion. Note the Moon-Neptune conjunction at the moment the nodes changed signs.

The nodes bind together two opposing signs, and help us understand the ways in which integrating opposites is a vital part of astrology and of life. Note that in astrology there are six pairs of opposites. There is not merely ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ or ‘dark’ and ‘light’. We get this six ways — and note as well that opposite signs are of the same gender classification (for example, Gemini and Sagittarius are both considered masculine signs). Adjoining signs are of opposite gender (such as Aries and Taurus).

So we have something here about parental reality (Cancer and Capricorn) giving way to something more fraternal and/or cousin-like or ovuncular (involving aunts and uncles). These are mellower relationships. Gemini and Sagg are also more concerned with information than tradition. I plan to say more about this as the eclipses approach.

When the nodes change signs, the eclipses do not always follow suit immediately. For example, later this year, we have a fairly unusual situation where there are partial solar eclipses two months in a row. One is in Gemini and one is in Cancer. The corresponding lunar eclipse is in Sagittarius. Here is a list from Serennu.com, programmed by Tracy Delaney. Note that the list also includes special planetary eclipses called occultations.

One interesting thing about the nodes shifting into Gemini and Sagittarius is that those are the signs associated with the nodes in ancient astrology. If you look on the Table of Essential Dignities that was all the rage during the Greek Empire, you find out that the the North Node ‘rules’ Gemini and the South Node ‘rules’ Sagittarius. Now they are in their opposite positions, but from what I hear that’s not a very big difference — the nodes have an affinity with these signs.

Two things I would point out for those who are working with the nodes in their natal chart is:

1. The house placement is more significant than the sign placement. The sign is definitely important, but the house has a lot to say about where the tendency indicated by the sign shows up. The houses give the location or situation in which the situation manifests.

2. The sign placement tells you what planet is associated with that node. For example, let’s say you have the North Node in Cancer. To find out more about how that node manifests, you would study the Moon carefully. You would also have the South Node in Capricorn; thus you would study Saturn carefully. To find out more about how the nodes relate, you would study the relationship between the Moon and Saturn.

Following this idea, when the transiting nodes change signs as they are doing now, we have a different pair of planetary rulers to consider. For the past 18 months we have been focused on the mommy/daddy world of the Moon and Saturn; now we get to have a long conversation with Mercury and Jupiter.

As I suggested a moment ago, many people work on charts for years and feel like they have no clue what the nodes are about. One reason the nodes are problematic for us here in the West is that we don’t understand cause and effect. We think that things just happen for no reason and that things we do have no effects. The nodes are here to remind us that cause and effect are never separate.

Weekly Horoscope for Friday, March 4, 2011, #851 – BY ERIC FRANCIS

Eric’s Zodiac Sign Descriptions

Aries (March 20-April 19) — You may have some wild dreams, and most of them are possible. Yet as you activate your potential you’re also likely to activate your fear. Here is something to consider: Fear showing up in the same approximate gesture as desire is one of the main excuses for people to deny what they want and to stuff down their potential. You’re in an extended phase when nearly all of your potential becomes available. At the same time you’re going to encounter your shadow material. You will make use of your potential by consciously processing your fear, guilt and denial. At the moment things may arise in a mixture that is challenging to sort, though the main character traits you will depend on are willingness and faith. When you’re wondering which is true, your potential or your fear, ask yourself: which do I want to be true?

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Aries, please go to this link.

Taurus (April 19-May 20) — You are more than a detached bystander; you’re a direct participant in whatever game you’re playing, whatever goal you have or whatever process you’re part of. I suggest that rather than deny your influence or the value of your experience, affirm these things regularly, and go on learning. Talent is not a destination, it’s something that you keep on growing and developing. That’s to say, it’s not about a goal, but rather an ongoing process of becoming. When you make this shift, you take yourself out of a linear process. That will save you from going in straight lines, as well as straight up hills, and it may go a long way toward preventing you from running in circles. Think of yourself as rippling out from a pond or exploring a labyrinth. Be alert for when you — or anyone else — thinks something original.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Taurus, please go to this link.

Gemini (May 20-June 21) — There are times in life when you have to take authority, and this is one of them. I suggest, however, that you not announce this fact, but rather allow it to be. There are many people involved, and some of them think they’re more experienced or have more authority than you do. Everyone needs to be treated differently, that is, uniquely; and in every case I suggest you honor who they think they are rather than who you think they are. This is Politics 101, and it helps to go into the game with a plan. The implication is to know both your perceptions and the self-perceptions of the ones you’re in some way dealing with. When it comes to matters of authority, power and politics, perception is most of the game. That includes when people underestimate you, which is precisely what will serve to your advantage. Just be sure of one thing — that you don’t overestimate yourself. With the South Node now in your sign, your own past might become a factor. Therefore, be humble, and work for the common good

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Gemini, please go to this link.

Cancer (June 21-July 22) — You may believe that what you want is far away in space or in time. I would say it’s closer than you think, and if you can tune your feelings to reflect that, you will get some confirmation. By tune your feelings, I mean feeling a sense of faithful anticipation, pleasure or attractiveness. Allow yourself into the possibility that the circumstances of your life are working together to help you manifest your desire. You can feel your desire to accelerate that, and I suggest you feel the pleasure of contact a little in advance. Visualize in all your senses, and in detail — you certainly have the imaginative power at the moment, only it’s about a lot more than ‘mere’ imagination: what you are experimenting with is the process of conscious manifestation, which always begins with a vision of some kind. Once you have the vision, you’re close to the reality.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Cancer, please go to this link.

Leo (July 22-Aug. 23) — Belief is taking on a particularly powerful role in your relationships, be they business or deeply personal. Mostly this is about the belief in commitment and how this manifests as commitment. You get to start by having faith in the people around you. One property to the evolution happening in your life is how all of your meaningful relationships are essentially in the same category: that is to say, meaningful. These are the ones that you have an unusual ability to shape with your ideas about them. Once you discover this property of thought, that’s a good time to express a vision for the relationship. A vision would be anything that you want, anywhere you want to go, anything you want to do. It’s true that this is influenced by the people with whom you share energy. But in the first instance, I suggest you be honest about what you want and see who shows up or rises to the calling.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Leo, please go to this link.

Virgo (Aug. 23-Sep. 22) — Well, you don’t need me to tell you that your relationships are showing up in a whole new way. You may need to filter out some static to get to the music: people you don’t quite want but who want you; desire that comes in an unappealing form; those who don’t give you enough space. Move through those factors quickly and efficiently so you don’t miss the good stuff: the people who are willing to dare, the ones whose desire speaks to you emotionally, in a specific way. There may be more than one person, by the way — and if you need permission, you have it. Be receptive to what the wildly diverse human race has to offer and closer to home, be open to the different ways you want to relate to others. Some will speak in words, some in feelings and others in a method or approach to life. You will know who you can relate to by how you feel in their presence.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Virgo, please go to this link.

Libra (Sep. 22-Oct. 23) — Do you have this sneaking feeling that you’re being asked to give up something so that you can have a secure home? That’s what it looks like. If you remember that you can have a secure home anyway, you won’t feel so compromised. That could make a big difference; acting voluntarily rather than feeling in any way coerced. You may also be aware of how honoring your deep nesting instinct requires you to live a certain way, within certain constraints — but I would propose that you have more flexibility in this mode than you may have guessed previously. There’s also more respectability than we tend to think is available to those for whom home and relationship are authentic life priorities. It’s true that you have other ways that you express devotion and service, and part of what you’re learning is the necessity for creating balance among the most meaningful facets of your life.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Libra, please go to this link.

Scorpio (Oct. 23-Nov. 22) — I have been emphasizing the theme of erotic experience. Mars has now made its way into Pisces, which is the lush, imaginal, erotic angle of your solar chart. Chiron arrived a few weeks ago, so you have a combination of energies that is driving your desire and your curiosity. The interesting thing about sex in our era is how much of it happens with digital assistance. These transits are encouraging you to use your own imagination (rather than that of some producer somewhere), your senses and your body. Chiron is reminding you that the way to free up healing energy and pleasure is to allow yourself to be inquisitive and to approach all matters of sexuality as if they’re an experiment. You can think of what you don’t know, and what you don’t know about yourself, as your friends. Imagination and reality are closer than they’ve ever been, though I suggest you lean gently into the physical world of contact and sensation.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Scorpio, please go to this link.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22-Dec. 22) — I pay close attention to the kids in my environment; it’s part out of fascination with human nature and part about being protective. Here is what I’ve noticed: Kids truly appreciate being acknowledged as people. Noticing their existence in a non-patronizing way, such as simply saying hello to them, is meaningful — more than you may have imagined. That is, unless you remember those who acknowledged your existence when you were young and so many people treated you as if you were invisible. You are in a phase of your life where you’re embarking on a kind of second childhood. This is about experimentation, creativity, pushing boundaries and enjoying the freedom of curiosity. While you’re on this journey, notice who notices and acknowledges your existence. When you’re in an open and loving state, those are the friends you need.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Sagittarius, please go to this link.

Capricorn (Dec. 22-Jan. 20) — What do you make? If you want a question by which to guide your career, that’s the one. Think deep on this. What is the product of the work you do? Let’s pretend you’re a lawyer. You could say your product is legal briefs and arguments, or you could say your product is justice (or at least satisfied clients). If you’re an artist, you could say you make paintings, but you also help co-create the responses that people have to your work. Your career is a generative process. That is the thing to remember: you will always be making something. No matter what you do, there’s a product. Do you like what it is? Are you a friend to the one who ultimately benefits? The law of karma is working particularly strongly in this area of your life. You’re likely to reap what you sow; therefore choose your seeds well.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Capricorn, please go to this link.

Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb. 19) — Your imagination is taking you somewhere specific. You may feel like you keep having the same fantasy or the same idea over and over again. May I suggest that you not worry about that, if it happens to be true? If it’s something you don’t want, or that you know might hurt you, that does lead to a question, but if we’re talking about something you’re curious about or fascinated by, you get to indulge yourself. If there’s a message involved, it’s likely to become obvious fairly soon. Here’s the thing to remember at this rather unusual moment of your growth: you can become anyone you want to be. You can use the power of your imagination to recreate this entity known as a ‘self’ into whatever turns you on. All you need is the vision and to focus on it. On our planet, those are two fairly big prerequisites for some, but I don’t think they will be for you.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Aquarius, please go to this link.

Pisces (Feb. 19-March 20) — Have you ever wondered why same-sex relationships and erotic contact are considered taboo? I know the Bible has a few things to say about that and eating shellfish. I mean have you ever really tried to figure it out? I suggest you give it a try. Why is it considered the unholiest of things, to the point where constitutional amendments get passed by freaked-out voters? Bisexuality can become an issue in hetero couples, people can have misgivings about their bi fantasies, and there is often considerable fear and shame about any of this being known. But — why? That’s the question of the week. It may be the question of the month and indeed of the century. I have my theories, which I will share with you in a future entry. For now I want to hear yours, particularly regarding what comes up during the Pisces New Moon today and this weekend.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Pisces, please go to this link.

———

Eric Francis, the founder and editor of Planet Waves, is an astrologer and investigative journalist. He was working in his first job as a municipal newspaper reporter when he discovered that his editor also owned an astrology bookstore. This began a long relationship between astrology and journalism, which has taken Eric through the pages of many newspapers as a horoscope writer, including the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror plus numerous other venues. Today, Eric covers global turning point events through the lens of astrology. He is a specialist in newly-discovered planets.

Revolution in the Aries (or is it Pisces)

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Dear Friend and Reader:

Revolution is seething in one of the unlikeliest regions of the world: not merely North Africa and the Middle East, but the United States. We might have asked when the people ruled by imams, mullahs, sultans, princes, kings, ayatollahs and ordinary leech despots were going to get restless. We might have guessed it would happen right around when Uranus and Pluto lined up in their current square aspect. And it looks like some of the same leadership styles are stirring up revolt to the United States as well. I’ll come back to that in a moment. Let’s start far from home and work our way back.

This combination of planets is the very signature of revolutionary eras. We are in one now — and it hasn’t reached its peak. We’ve just seen dictators tumble in Tunisia and Egypt, with uprisings currently underway in Algeria, Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Morocco and Yemen — so far. Many have turned bloody in recent days.

The overthrow of the Mubarak dictatorship last month in Egypt was nothing short of astonishing, at least as it was happening. For 30 years, Mubarak ran the country brutally, with his secret police force ‘disappearing’ citizens into the Ministry of the Interior if they got out of line. He was turned into a fugitive in just 18 days. His spy chief, who had been Dick Cheney’s go-to guy on ‘extraordinary rendition’ (the U.S. offshore torture program), got to be vice president for two weeks, before he, too, was reduced to a political mummy.

And, though the news out of Egypt has turned dark with the sexual assault of CBS News chief foreign affairs correspondent Lara Logan, the revolution there has continued to spread across the region, and in at least two countries this week there has been violent government pushback.

Focus on Libya and Bahrain

Libya is an Arabic country situated between Egypt, Algeria and Tunisia in Northern Africa. Libya’s autocratic ruler for the past four decades, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, responded in January to the unrest in Tunisia by reassuring the Libyan people that such protests were not necessary in their country. Apparently the people there decided otherwise. What keeps happening is some dictator tells the protestors to go home and they just get more worked up. Go figure.

Chart for Bahrain’s supposed independence. This is the chart for when it was announced on BBC radio in a neighboring country — the best that world horoscope datameister Nick Campion could do.

Citing a Libyan newspaper, Quryna, Reuters reported that protesters, angered by the arrest of a human rights activist, rallied in Libya’s second largest city, Benghazi, on Tuesday night. Protests have continued in several Libyan cities, and on Thursday activists declared a ‘Day of Rage’ to oppose Qaddafi. Clashes with pro-Qaddafi supporters and snipers with the Internal Security Forces left several dead and many wounded in the eastern city of Beyida. There were simultaneous protests in at least five other Libyan cities.

Let’s consider Bahrain more closely. This is a little island nation in the Persian Gulf. It’s a U.S. client state, the docking port of our navy’s Fifth Fleet. It’s also a playground of the Bush family. I recall half the island being leased to a relative of the Bush family during Bush War I as an R & R depot for the coalition military. What is more interesting is that in 1990, months before the Gulf War started, Harken Energy, George W. Bush’s beleaguered company, was given drilling rights in and around Bahrain. Remember that this is the story of the Middle East — the lines on the map move from side to side; countries are treated like companies; leaders are installed, kingdoms made and unmade. I guess we could ask an Atlantean philosopher or historian why this is, but for now, we can just read about Churchill, who did a lot of this after World War II.

This week the people of that little country started protesting, and overnight Wednesday to Thursday were ambushed by the military. At least four people were killed and hundreds of others injured from buckshot, concussion grenades and rubber bullets. Bahrainians have experienced some of the most violent pushback from their government in the whole region. Let’s take a look at the national chart (posted above) and see what’s going on.

Unlike many other charts, distinctly influenced by Uranus and Pluto, to me it looks like Chiron is the star in Bahrain. This is the planet associated with transition, awareness and healing that was discovered in 1977 (Chiron is the first centaur, a type of minor planet). The only thing solid about Bahrain is how oppressive its government is. It’s a real stretch to call it a nation. The chart I’m using is for its ‘independence’, but to me that just says ‘availability to other interests’, all of whom are offshore.

We see the oppressive government show up as Saturn in the 7th house, sitting on the Moon like a hen sits on an egg. Those are on the right side of the chart. Saturn (the government) is yellow and the Moon (the people) is the grey crescent.

The egg seems like it’s hatching. Saturn and the Moon are in Gemini. Chiron has recently begun its trek across Pisces. It’s making an explosive square aspect to the Moon; eventually it will square Saturn too. This is going to go on for a few years, in waves. But the big push is now, because Chiron is conjunct centaur planet Pholus, which releases a lot of pent-up pressure. There is something here about getting sick of being lied to: Chiron square Neptune in Sagittarius.

Tremors in Madison and Puerto Rico

Revolution is quietly brewing in the hearts of Americans, though until recently it’s been introduced as a brand without a product. Americans have consented to wars, the looting of the treasury, billions in tax dollars being donated to massively wealthy stock traders, and the loss of civil liberties. Now that the government wants to take back union rights and pensions, people are getting angry — and it’s starting off somewhere excellent, in Madison, Wisconsin.

Madison is one of the last holdouts of the true American left, but its new Republican governor, product of the Tea Party movement, is now doing the bidding of corporate interests. In response to the Republican-backed plan to strip collective bargaining rights and pensions, there have been protests there day after day. On Thursday night, 30,000 people had shut down the city center. Rachel Maddow reported last night that Wisconsin actually had a budget surplus until Gov. Scott Walker started giving away tax credits to corporations, creating an artificial shortfall and using this as an excuse to take away pensions.

His minions proposed legislation to strip collective bargaining rights covers most public employee unions — but not all of them (police and firefighter unions were not included in the bill). Maddow’s analysis is that this measure, which saves the state no money, was designed to eliminate the only organized Democratic voter base in the state, the unions. (Watch her analysis here.) A number of Democratic state senators left the state to break the senate’s quorum and prevent it from adopting the law.

Many other locales that actually are facing a budget shortfall are proposing the same kinds of measures, however, and attempts at stripping benefits, eliminating pensions and busting unions are likely to be big news as public debt mounts (and bankers are given ever-larger bonuses). The thing about Uranus-Pluto is not just that people get rebellious — there’s usually something meaningful to rebel against.

What we have here, by the way, is Enron on a massive scale. Anyone remember Enron, the company that took over California’s electrical grid, stole the pensions of thousands of PE & G employees (and its own employees), ripped off the California ratepayers (of “f*ck Aunt Millie” fame) and then went bankrupt?

That whole mess came to the surface in late 2001, when Chiron entered Capricorn. I proposed at the time that Chiron was running vanguard for Pluto in Capricorn, and that if we didn’t clean up what came to light then, it would repeat with Pluto in Capricorn. So what we’re seeing is a national movement by government to bust unions and take back pensions. Maybe we think unions are quaint things like old Beatles albums, but pensions are the only real savings many people have.

Meanwhile in Puerto Rico, students this week got control of their campus after a violent police occupation that lasted two months. Given that Puerto Rico is a colony of the United States, or an occupied territory, I am very happy to see a revolt happening there. Puerto Rico is a place dear to my heart and is well worth a full edition. Let’s see if we have an occasion to do that.

Uranus Square Pluto and an Age of Awakening

Remember that in the background of all of this passion and protest is Uranus square Pluto. We have met this aspect before. Technically, Uranus square Pluto holds its exact geometry for just three years (this one goes from 2012 to 2015). Yet astro-historian Richard Tarnas, author of the acclaimed Cosmos and Psyche, notes that this aspect and those in its group (the conjunction and opposition) can have an orb of influence extending for more than a decade.

We see this in the cycles of history. The most recent major alignment of Uranus and Pluto happened in 1965-1966, fueling what we think of as the Sixties. Yet we can see early rumblings of what we think of as 1960s-styled social progress going back to the mid-1950s, when the Supreme Court ordered integration of public schools in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

In that same era, the Beat Generation of writers, known for its liberationist philosophy, drugs, rambling adventures, alternative forms of sexuality, freedom of expression and anti-materialism — all characteristic of Uranus-Pluto — came to prominence a full decade before the conjunction, breaking open barriers that millions of people would cross in the following years. Bob Dylan said he never would have become who he was if he hadn’t read On the Road by Jack Kerouac.

There is often a slow warm-up of Uranus-Pluto aspects, as events scattered across time and geography coalesce into what seems like one vast movement. One thing leads to another. Social change, pointed toward the future, gathers momentum and then feels inevitable.

It’s often in hindsight that we put together the effects of this type of astrology, though at the moment all we need to do is look at the front page of any newspaper or news website — and feel the vibes pulsing through the planet waves. This thing we keep describing as 2012 has as its epicenter the Uranus-Pluto square.

Pluto has been stirring the pot of Capricorn for two years now, and Uranus is about to make its ingress into Aries, where it will be the next seven years. You can think of Pluto as having softened up previously hard and fast institutions: banks and national economies have collapsed, dictators have fallen by the wayside. Moreover, ideas about power are changing. At the same time, it looks like the rich are getting ever richer and taking more and more from people. We don’t know how this is going to play out, but we can look at some astrological pictures of the future and see what they tell us. And what they suggest is that there is an awakening happening.

Around the corner from Capricorn is Aries, and Jupiter has recently arrived there. It’s currently square Pluto. Jupiter square Pluto is a passionate aspect, with the feeling of religious zeal and an all-or-nothing approach to existence. The elemental force of Pluto focuses the idealism of Jupiter into clarity and action, giving drive and substance to what were previously just interesting ideas. In early March, just before the equinox, Uranus arrives in Aries to stay for the next seven years. The ingress of this inventive, revolutionary energy into Aries feels like an extended springtime of the soul. It looks like the ultimate astrology of a global awakening, based on millions of individual awakenings.

There is the recognition that ‘the world is changing and so am I’. We get an invitation to expand our ideas about existence, and live closer to the edge with more vitality and explore life with an experimental spirit. Let’s face it. The smug piety that has permeated society during the past few decades could use a few friendly cosmic jolts of orgasm. Our ideas about relationships have grown so moldy and brittle the best thing we can do with them is chop them up and make a huge bonfire on the spring equinox.

The Charts of the United States and Iran

Astrological events that affect countries also affect people. We all live on the same planet. Let’s consider how that bonfire might look in two national horoscopes.

The chart of the Iranian revolution of 1979 is due for a revolution of its own. Take a look at the left side of the chart — Aries rising, Aries Moon and Eris in Aries. Uranus is coming through, and it’s going to shake up the youth, the population at large and the national identity.

Let’s consider Iran, which seems to be the epicenter of the Western world’s worst imaginary fears. The chart I prefer for Iran is the return of the Ayatollah Khomeini to his country in February 1979 — which was the start of the revolution that year. The chart has early Aries rising and an Aries Moon. This is a spritely, adventurous chart on the outside, driven by emotion and a bit of chaos. It’s definitely the chart of a volatile revolution. Whatever you may think of the famous Ayatollah, the ousting of the U.S.-backed shah and Khomeini’s arrival was an exciting moment in world history.

Behind the revolutionary glee, masked by a kind of militant populism, is a conservative and authoritarian core. That is characterized in the chart by the government angle poking up into Capricorn. And behind that is all the religiosity we know is one of Iran’s most famous exports — Venus and Neptune are in Sagittarius in no less than the 9th house. This verges on comical. These people in charge don’t take religion seriously. To them it is what a beautiful woman was to Ernest Hemingway. Religion is sex, and their minds are on fire with the stuff in a way that we just do not understand here except maybe in the most electrified Baptist church. The thing is that all that lust is under the chilling effect of Saturn in Virgo. That’s like making love with the sex manual out. However, the new generation is simply not interested. In the sex manual that is. In other ways they seem like they’re on fire.

Now that Uranus is moving up on that Aries ascendant, a hidden factor is coming to light: the youth of the nation are rising up. There is a new generation that has no desire to be told what to believe, threatened with execution and told they’re bad people.

Pluto going through the government angle of the revolution is making the national leaders feel like they’re concentrating their power, but what they are really doing is collapsing their own structure. They seem like they’re on top of things, but they’re about to be met by a revolutionary force unlike anything they’ve ever encountered. Remember that Iran is a country prone to revolutions, and it has a long history. The mullahs are relative newcomers. The Persian people have been there a lot longer.

Revolt Against Commodification

As for revolution in the United States: it doesn’t look like a political event — it looks like a personal and economic one. I wish I could explain the horoscope of the United States to Karl Marx. I’m not sure if he would accept the premise of astrology, but he would recognize his idea that the primary U.S. chart paints the picture of a commodified nation. Everything becomes a commodity; if you get paid for something, you get respect. It allegedly matters less if you have talent — and most people seem to like it that way. [I covered this in Wednesday’s weekly audio.]

This is the most widely used chart of the United States, called the Sibly Chart (named after the astrologer who provided the data). There are other charts, including an earlier chart with the Sun in Scorpio, as well as a Virgo rising chart. The story of how this chart came into being is a complex, interesting story stuffed with Masonic connections and Medieval techniques, which I’ll get to around July 4. The chart is the symbolic representation of the independence of the 13 new states.

Here’s how it looks in the chart: Sagittarius rising puts Cancer in an area of the chart called the 8th house. That’s the house of ‘other people’s resources’, a complex area which includes sex, banking, stock trading, inheritances, dowries and marriage contracts. That sounds like a weird mix, but they all have one thing in common, which is resources changing from one party to the other, or resources being traded. It’s a house where you can gain a lot, experience deep pleasure and, notably, sell out very easily.

You can also invest there and lose all your money. The 8th is the house of ‘sign your life away’: the house of commodification. Obviously people experience this in other countries, but there are few places on Earth that have turned everyone and everything into a commodity, where if you take care of people you can be accused of being a traitor. Our characteristically American expressions include, ‘You have to sell yourself all the time’ and ‘You have to give him credit, he’s making a lot of money’. I would contend that to the extent that these have been global values, they are American exports.

Our great nation has many planets in this house — Sun plus Venus, Jupiter and a few others. This alignment indicates how much wealth we actually have, but also the extent to which it’s been squandered in ‘investment’ institutions. The concentration is early in the sign, which in part explains what’s been happening to our banking system. Pluto in Capricorn has been coming at those Cancer planets like an evolutionary battering ram. The cardinal cross I’ve been writing about for a year is directly influencing this cluster, and this idea of everything is a commodity. Of course the plutocrats know how to make the most of this. They have concentrated a lot of wealth. The price we might have to pay for those bank executives losing all their money is the whole system coming down. Their message seems to be, you can have the crumbs if we get the meal. Then we all get to eat.

However, in the next act, Uranus, the planet of revolution, is going to make a series of square (90-degree) aspects to those planets. That is action. It tells me that we are starting to figure out how sold-out we are, how ripped off we’ve been, and in the same gesture, follow the impulse to do something about it. This is a rebellious impulse but it’s also self-creative, and in fact the self-creative seems to burst out first. I would propose that from a growth standpoint that’s a healthy thing. Rebelling for its own sake only goes so far, but following a creative impulse that moves blockages and stuck energy out of the way is another thing altogether.

For the United States, Aries occupies one of the most creative (and also sexual) angles of the chart, and Uranus in Aries is about self-actualization. Taken in the most positive light, I see this transit firing up the courage and thirst for freedom that many people need in order to be themselves. Authenticity is a concept we could use more of. I see a lot of energy being released for the American people by Uranus in Aries, and a widespread movement to claim ourselves back.

Of course, this process will threaten those who are attached to the past. And it will be risky for everyone. Along the way to getting free, we must encounter our own attachments, our own fear and guilt. But these tend to yield to creative impulses. And while humanity may seem like it’s in one of its most backwards moments ever, creativity, self-actualization and the drive for liberation are time-honored human traditions as old as the Great Sphinx — and equally mysterious.

Yours & truly,

Two Hot Charts, Happening Right Now

Jupiter is at the very top left. Pluto is the red golf tee on the lower right. Notice that they have the exact same numbers after them, in cardinal signs — that is the square aspect.

Two astonishing aspects are developing right now, both taking place the last week of February. I’m going to take them in reverse order. First, a reminder that the Sun ingresses Pisces today. Both of these charts involve Pisces planets, with the Sun in Pisces. That provides a lot of resonance for these events.

We’re currently in the run-up to an aspect called Jupiter square Pluto. This is an impassioned aspect that happens about every six years, so it’s not your everyday astrology. These two powerhouses combine to conduct the soulful, highly focused evolutionary power of Pluto through the cosmic intelligence of Jupiter. The square is obsessive and passionate; it is not given to the best judgment. It’s the kind of aspect that thinks it’s right whether it’s right or wrong, and we can look to this astrology for the religious zeal that both leaders and populations are pitting against one another in demonstrations in the Middle East and in the United States.

Let’s just say this comes with commitment if not discernment. At its worst it’s devious and at its best it’s on fire with drive and determination. That happens on Feb. 25, with Jupiter in Aries and Pluto in Capricorn. You can just feel this one pulsing through the ethers. Though Uranus square Pluto is brewing, Jupiter is what has facilitated the current burst of awareness and passion. It’s a kind of warmup for Uranus arriving in Aries on March 11.

Note that Jupiter is one of the ruling planets of Pisces. The two planets associated with Pisces are getting a lot of action in these years, and we’re starting to see it burst into consciousness. The second aspect involves the ‘modern ruler’ of Pisces, which is Neptune. Still in late Aquarius for the moment, Neptune is about to take a simultaneous conjunction from Mars and Mercury. This happens Feb. 20, so we’re right in the mix now. To me this aspect looks like an invitation to do some fabulously hot writing. Like Jupiter square Saturn, it’s begging for positive expression, and that energy is abundantly available. Partly, it’s a matter of slowing down your mind enough to follow your own thoughts.

The three critters with the number 28 next to them are Mars, Neptune and Mercury, in an exact conjunction. We’ve had quite a few triple conjunctions lately, but nothing
quite like this.

The combination is Mercury, Mars and Neptune. Mercury + Mars is fast mind, that can move from concept to conclusion instantly. It’s a good aspect for an editor or lawyer to have, assuming they are at least a bit tempered; this aspect can light a fire in the mind. Add Neptune to this and the flash goes off in the imagination. In Aquarius, it’s got a kinky, intellectual or technological feeling. This would be the perfect chart to launch a very smart porn site. While it’s not purely about sex, Mars (ruler of Scorpio) gives that feeling. Note that Jupiter (a planet connected to Pisces) is teaming up with Pluto (a planet connected to Scorpio) and we get a similar picture here.

This astrology is excellent for making movies, conceptualizing them or even watching them in good company (the friends are signified by Aquarius). However, if you’re not taking it on a creative level, and I mean consciously directed energy with some discipline mixed in, these might be slippery — for example, it’s easy DWI territory, good for misunderstandings and stupid fights, etc. So I suggest you focus your mind on something you’re passionate about, hang out with people you trust, and keep some basic boundaries in mind. Then, these aspects will be a lot of fun.

Attention Light Bridge Subscribers: We are very close to finishing Light Bridge, the 2011 annual edition of Planet Waves. If you have purchased Light Bridge, please check your email right after the weekend for the notice that the site is live. If you have not signed up yet, you may do so here.

Weekly Horoscope for Friday, February 18, 2011, #850 – BY ERIC FRANCIS

Eric’s Zodiac Sign Descriptions

Aries (March 20-April 19) — You feel like you lack the substance or the energy to live up to your potential. I don’t think you’ll be lacking energy for long, and as for substance, that is a matter of grounding. I suggest that you take the idea of grounding, initially, as focusing on a specific purpose. At the moment, you may find yourself being obsessed over a work-related goal, but I would propose you might want to shift that emphasis and make it a personal goal. That is, of course, if you think there’s a difference. If you don’t, more power to you: that’s a sign you’re already committed to a purpose and identify with it strongly. In truth we’re not ‘work people’ and ‘personal people’ or ‘relationship people’, we are one unified critter. The astrology of this moment is about getting as close to your core as you can, and thriving on that passion.

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Taurus (April 19-May 20) — There once was a writer named Simone de Beauvoir. I’ve only read her translated into English, but she is amazing. One thing I learned from her appears in your charts this week. She proposes that women and men are conditioned differently on a few key themes, one of which is the purpose of relationships in their lives. Men are trained that their relationships are part of their lives; women, she says, are trained to believe that their lives are about their relationships. I’m with Simone in my observation that underneath the conditioning, men and women have far more in common than most will admit, but this one observation has always impressed me as revealing so much. I can tell you that the astrology of the next few days can show you how big your world is, how many people care about you, and how many adventures you have available.

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Gemini (May 20-June 21) — Today the Sun enters Pisces, making a conjunction to Chiron (newly arrived in Pisces). The Sun sheds light, and I think this will answer some of your recent doubts about whether you’re really ‘good enough’ to do what you want to do, and whether you have what it takes to focus the talent that you want to express. The thing about seeking your fortunes in some creative way, and with that I would include taking creative approaches to everyday activities, is that your real assets sometimes feel intangible. Chiron’s presence in the angle of your chart that addresses reputation and achievement has two main influences: one is to stir up your doubts, and the other is to focus your power. I suggest you work with this polarity. There is good information on both sides of the dilemma, and both polarities can propel you nicely toward your most cherished goals.

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Cancer (June 21-July 22) — Take a breath. This really weird Full Moon is over, and the Moon has entered a more grounded sign — Virgo. You now get to think about everything you’ve just experienced. But don’t try to make it make too much sense. Take a light approach to your mental process. You might try to overcompensate for the warpy uncertainty of the past week with obsessive overthinking. Rather, put your ideas to work. Ride on the momentum of the Moon — it’s still at full phase. But let it light up your mind with ideas, new approaches to old problems, and clarity to help you remedy your self-critical tendencies. One way to catch the energy is to write. And I do mean Friday and Saturday, as soon as possible, particularly if you’re feeling the need or inspiration to put something into words.

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Leo (July 22-Aug. 23) — You like to give people the benefit of the doubt; for the next week or so, I suggest you hold them to a slightly higher standard. Verify what you’re told; you may be particularly inclined to believe people you find especially compelling. In this process, the first source of information is what you hear from them. You know those times when someone tells you, ‘I’m a total jerk,’ and you forget to notice or you think it doesn’t apply to you. Then, you’re surprised when the person turns out to actually be a jerk. Well, listen to all of that stuff, and remember it. Be particularly alert to people who tell you they have problems with honesty, or with alcohol or other substances. Be alert to those who only talk about their problems. There are other people available — people who have been there and done that, and are very cool.

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Virgo (Aug. 23-Sep. 22) — You seem to be keeping your clarity and sailing your boat upright despite some stormy seas around you. If you had a completely warped week at the office, complete with clairvoyant events, dependable people slacking off, other people cranky from getting no sleep, and probably a computer or two taking on a life of its own. In the past, this is the kind of thing that might have spun you around; I foresee a time in your life when you have the pleasure of letting others do all the spinning around and getting dizzy, while you look for productive involvements. You will always be drawn into your community. Make sure you check at least two qualities on the short checklist of fun, helpful or interesting before you do.

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Libra (Sep. 22-Oct. 23) — Your sign is the one cut from whole cloth on the theme of how any physical ailment has an emotional root. This will be true for many people but you’re particularly sensitive to this, and the emotional nature of what may ail you at any moment may be contagious. It’s not necessarily that there is a virus going around, but rather a feeling. It may seem odd to anyone whose sensibilities go in the direction of germ-based Western medicine to think that a feeling that leads to the sensation of being ill is contagious, but I am sure you could come up with many examples in a few minutes. This works for specific forms of discomfort, and happily the situation also points to the remedy existing on the level of understanding those feelings. The Sun making a conjunction to Chiron in the health and well-being area of your chart says that you can learn everything you need to know about how to feel good.

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Scorpio (Oct. 23-Nov. 22) — For the moment, I don’t suggest you trust your emotions. Note what they are, but it would not be a wise idea to act on them, or make decisions or even judgments. It’s a great time for things like art, or sex with people you really, truly trust. Remember that you may have some extreme emotional responses or reactions, so whoever you share time and space with needs to be able to handle this. One useful approach to this astrology is to study things from your past that you have reason to doubt. This is a little like taking a homeopathic approach to something that requires clarity. The astrology has a deceptive, unstable quality, but this also gives it a penetrating effect. It has the feeling of ‘too rich for words’. You might want to express your discoveries in words, but the words will be more memorable and poignant if you illustrate them with pictures. These don’t have to be ones you make, but also movies you watch or images that you find.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Scorpio, please go to this link.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22-Dec. 22) — Jupiter, the planet of Sagittarius, is walking into a 90-degree aspect with Pluto — that’s called Jupiter square Pluto. This is designed to give you plenty of confidence in yourself, though I suggest you go light with that. There’s something passionate about this aspect, but it can be devious and self-destructive. Other aspects suggest you may not see the effects of your thinking until it’s a bit too late, so I suggest you delay decisions or ‘final conclusions’ for about five days. Making any moves or snap judgments under pressure is definitely not advisable, but you might want to save your first impressions for future review. You’re in a potent new phase where your creativity or some vibrant idea is taking over your life. The art to art and love is using these potent forces constructively, and considering the greatest good.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Sagittarius, please go to this link.

Capricorn (Dec. 22-Jan. 20) — You may be totally, completely wrong about a financial matter, so there is no use worrying. Nor should you get too excited if your balance is $50,000 too high. In fact, you might want to skip the whole money thing until next week, and focus on having fun. One element of your astrology gives you freedom from beliefs about what you think is true for you, and always has been. Another element offers an emotional power surge and an entirely different idea. This may feel like a sudden, fiery burst of awareness that feels like I am who I am. Remember that this is as much about forgetting who you thought you were as it is about remembering something new. In this kind of learning process, both are vital. This will teach you to let go of the habit of doing so much remembering who you were that you don’t have space to make a new discovery or two.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Capricorn, please go to this link.

Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb. 19) — Karma, translated as simply as possible, is about the results of your actions. The big joke of karma in Western civilization is that we forget that our actions have results (much less consequences), and thus we keep acting as if they do not. This causes a lot of problems, and we may wonder where they all came from. An aspect in your sign this week (a four-planet exact conjunction) is a reminder to study the process of cause and effect. In some ways it’s more obvious than it seems; in other ways it’s less obvious. Observe both, and see if you can get in on the game and use this mysterious translation from potential to manifestation for your benefit. Remember that there is no effect without a cause, and no cause without an effect. Where you have one you will have the other, which will resolve many mysteries for you — ongoing.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Aquarius, please go to this link.

Pisces (Feb. 19-March 20) — For the past year, most of the standout astrological events have involved Pisces or one of the planets associated with it. But in that typically fishy way, many have been just offstage, behind the scenes or active in the background of your chart. That began to change recently, if you had not noticed from the intensified reactions of people around you, an increase in your sense of presence on the planet, and newfound energy that seems to be driving you toward specific goals. Fears that used to plague you have disappeared like steam. The odd sense that you had no idea what was bothering you has been replaced by a determination to solve your problems and move onto more creative things. The Sun enters your sign for a month today. Take that time and appreciate everything you’ve done for yourself and the world.

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Egypt: For Now, the People are in Charge

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Dear Friend and Reader:

After yesterday’s very strange day in Egypt — beginning with early reports by numerous supposedly reliable sources that Mubarak would resign and ending with him transferring power to Vice President Omar Suleiman, but keeping the title of president — nobody can say for sure what is happening in Egypt. Today is expected to be the biggest day of protest since the demonstrations began 18 days ago.

Chart for the military stating that it had convened the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which has not met since 1973. The chart shows a situation delicately balanced on the military but with the people in charge of the country.

Outrage at Mubarak’s refusal to actually quit has pushed the country to the point of explosion.

As we go to press Friday morning, it seems like everything rests in the hands of the military, which is holding space between the Egyptian people and Mubarak, whose ouster they are demanding. His refusal to step down seems calculated to push a showdown between the people and the army. Though the military is in a sense neutral, “That neutrality helps the crowds and hurts Mr. Mubarak,” historian Juan Cole said on Thursday night’s Rachel Maddow Show.

This morning there were news reports that ‘Al Arabiya television reported that Mubarak and his family had left Cairo to an unknown destination from a military airbase in the suburbs’.

A heavily armed contingent of Marines has moved into the American embassy in Cairo and has been maintaining a perimeter from the inside for several days. Egyptian security forces are guarding the embassy from outside. After considerable research last night we could not confirm reports that American warships from the 5th fleet had moved into the Suez Canal, which connects the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea.

Most sources on-scene are saying that the Egyptian military — while divided in its support for Mubarak, who has ruled under a state of emergency for 30 years — is not going to open fire on the people. Thursday, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces issued what it called Communique #1, at 5 pm Cairo time, confirming this. The Supreme Council has convened only twice before: during the wars against Israel in 1967 and 1973.

“In affirmation and support for the legitimate demands of the people, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces convened today, 10 February 2011, to consider developments to date,” an army spokesman declared on state television, in what was described as communiqué No. 1 of the army command, “and decided to remain in continuous session to consider what procedures and measures that may be taken to protect the nation, and the achievements and aspirations of the great people of Egypt,” The New York Times reported.

The chart for communique #1 seems like a decisive moment, or at least a turning point, at the end of a really weird day. It’s an interesting chart, which illustrates the stance of the military as stated in its letter. Here is what I see.

The Moon is the highest planet. It’s in the 10th house of government, extremely strong in Taurus (its sign of exaltation). The Moon represents the people, who are solid in their values — the generals, as they have said, perceive that the people are in charge and that they have legitimate issues. Cancer (which the Moon rules) is on the 12th house, so the Moon comes out of the vast and overwhelming 12th — the Egyptian public, the most populous in the Middle East. The 12th is an intangible; the Moon’s presence in Taurus gives it a more solid form.

Notably, Mubarak, born in early May, has become the brunt of a good few Taurus jokes, based mostly on his tenacity in the face of extreme resistance. But he does actually appear to be going through a transformation. The ruling planet of that midheaven, Venus, is currently conjunct Pluto and Vesta. He has given up something, namely the powers of the presidency.

There is a massive crowd showing up in the 7th house, shown by all those planets on the right side of the chart. That would be the opposition movement. Leo is rising, which tells us about the matter in question — the military’s statement. And the military (the Sun, ruler of Leo) is aligned with the people in Aquarius, opposite the sign rising. So far, so good. [A second indicator of the army, the ruler of the 6th house (which is Saturn) lands in Libra, retrograde — another sign of restraint.]

There is, however, something that indicates how fragile the situation really is. Though you cannot see it clearly in the chart, when you look at the numbers, Mars is exactly (to within one degree) halfway between the Sun and Mercury. Mars, always a co-ruler of the military in a public chart, is also conjunct Nessus, a centaur planet of karma coming back through a cycle of events. Nessus also indicates an injury based on psychic abuse of some kind; it would seem the armed forces have also struggled under the dictatorship.

That midpoint is tricky and a little unstable, and if there is peace it’s a delicate state of affairs. In addition, the Sun — the military and its ideas — are headed toward Neptune. There may be a loss of the apparent solidity of the Sun: a message gets lost, its power gets lost in a fog, or there is a deception going on. And there is stuff they don’t understand and that they don’t know. Obviously Mubarak is concerned that there could be a military coup — that is more likely than the army firing on the people.

My sense is that the military is not entirely trustworthy. While they are not opening fire on the public, there have been reports of disappearances and torture. We also see this untrustworthy quality in the natal chart for the Republic of Egypt, which we covered last week. There is something two-faced about the beloved Egyptian army, in which people have so much faith.

The real tension point in this chart is that the Taurus Moon is about to make a series of square aspects to all those Aquarius planets in the 7th, starting with Ceres, Mars, Nessus, the Sun and last, Neptune, ending this chapter of the story. As the Moon makes these squares, it will push the situation closer to the edge, and it may seem like it’s bent well past the breaking point. If the sides or the meaning of events are unclear or uncertain today, they only seem headed for greater uncertainty as the Moon waxes toward full phase and popular momentum gathers.

There is plenty we don’t know about that is not being reported by the U.S. media. For example, the Global Intelligence blog reported last week that, “US intelligence sources disclosed that exactly a week ago, on Jan. 29, an attempt was made on the life of Egyptian Vice President Omar Suleiman in central Cairo as his convoy left the presidential palace. He had just been sworn in by President Hosni Mubarak as Vice President. Suleiman escaped unharmed but two of his bodyguards were killed. The sources said the attack bore the marks of professional, well-trained hitmen. The attack was denied in Cairo but US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton confirmed it in Munich when she said the assassination attempt was a sign of instability in Egypt.”

We will update the Planet Waves blog with details as we learn them.

Yours & truly,

Be My Valentine

Note to Readers: This week’s article is an expanded version of my February column in a regional magazine where I live, called Chronogram.

Dear Friend and Reader:

When I first started writing for Chronogram, an arts and culture magazine where I live in the Hudson Valley, I once succeeded in causing a controversy.

Photo by Eric Francis.

Oh really? you say. And how was that?

Well, I wrote a three-part series on polyamory — that is, on what some call ‘responsible nonmonogamy’ and others call ‘open relationships’. I guess this was around 1997. It seems like so long ago. I started the first of the three articles by coming out to my readers as polyamorous; I thought it was a good idea to get that fact out of the way. I love relationships and the art of relating, and I like to connect with whomever feels right to relate with, in whatever way is mutually agreeable.

(Trust me, those terms and conditions don’t leave a lot of room for the anarchy you may think is brewing.)

I described my motivations and a bit about my experiences, and mentioned that there exist a significant number of people who either are polyamorous or want to be, but who don’t quite feel comfortable speaking up. Sometimes, though, just learning the word has a way of setting someone free — I’ve heard that a lot. Other people, though, can get defensive, as if the one and only legitimate form of relationship is being compromised. Jason Stern, one of the founders of Chronogram who was then its editor, said that he was hearing from readers and advertisers about the series from people even five years later. Five years! You know, the usual complaints about how his writer was going to bring down Western civilization and so forth.

As of today, the topic has been covered by everyone from Newsweek to Huffington Post and appears as a regular feature on the website of Psychology Today.

Polyamory has been discussed on the pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and The Independent (UK). There exists a very nice blog with archives going back to 2005 that is devoted to keeping up with all the news coverage and analysis polyamory gets. It’s called Polyamory in the News and it will come up with Google’s ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ option. There are so many published news and website references to polyamory that it’s both impressive and funny. The archives are brimming with this open secret, this thing that’s so taboo nobody can bring themselves to talk about it anywhere but at a polyamory conference. I’ve found that most of the news stories are fairly balanced, describing well-adapted adults making choices about the structure of their families.

I have my reasons for suspecting why the issue is so touchy-hushy, which I won’t get into in this article (I covered them in an earlier article called The One and The Many.)

Photo by Eric Francis.

But before I go on, let me say this.

You read it here first.

If you were reading Chronogram or Planet Waves at the time, you read it before it was a thing in the mainstream press, and long before the LGBTQ movement had its wings or its many letters. You read it before many documentaries were made. You read it here before it was cool to come out (as anything). You read it nine whole years before the word polyamory was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006.

Here is how those erudite scholars define the word: “The fact of having simultaneous close emotional relationships with two or more other individuals, viewed as an alternative to monogamy, esp. in regard to matters of sexual fidelity; the custom or practice of engaging in multiple sexual relationships with the knowledge and consent of all partners concerned.”
In other words, not Tiger Woods. And not King Henry VIII, about whom the term polyamorist was used in 1953 to describe him, in the Illustrated History of English Literature, Volume 1 by A. C. Ward. This may have actually been the first iteration, and in a sense Henry was polyamorous in the eyes of the church. Today, he would be called a ‘serial monogamist’, which I think is an oxymoron; I prefer ‘serial polyamorist’ for those who have their relationships in a long sequence.

I would add a couple of things missing from the OED’s definition. One is that it’s a sexual and emotional orientation. It is not for everyone, and there is a good chance one is either born polyamorous, or that the capacity or need exists on a deep level in the psyche. Many people who are in monogamous relationships are closeted polys. They can be filled with the same guilt and shame and self-questioning as a gay kid whose friends are predominantly straight.

And while relatively few people openly identify as polyamorous, there are many who are so in practice. They just don’t want to be labeled. I can see the point, though I’m not a big fan of denial. There comes a time in life when you have to say who you are, to the people who really matter.

Many others are curious and restless, knowing that for them monogamy has run its course. The one certified form of relationship is not giving them space to get their needs met. Many couples are eager to open up their relationships, and not just because they want some sexual variety; they also crave the bonding, growth opportunities, and expanded community that come with doing so. And yes, some grounded sexual freedom feels really good. If you’re one of these people, go on Amazon and start ordering books.

Photo by Eric Francis.

In many of my other writings about sexuality and about polyamory I emphasize the idea that the actual thing we need to be doing is exploring our individuation. I believe that our obsession with relationships, finding our soul mate, hooking the right guy to marry and so forth, are a big distraction from learning to be who we are. I believe that exploring polyamory can — no guarantee here, but a possibility — help facilitate that quest for individuation because it requires us to take a conscious step into who we are.

Then the practice of being yourself, which means being fully honest, with several different people, and explaining this to your friends and family, is the perfect kind of confrontation that provides us with the space to individuate. People provide different kinds of mirrors, and the more mirrors you explore yourself in, the more points of view you will get.

As part of this process, you will get a rare and beautiful opportunity to face your insecurities, do something about your jealousy and unpack lots of the baggage you’re carrying from childhood. And you get the chance to hold space for your brothers and sisters to do the same. There is a lot of processing inherent in being polyamorous, especially at first.

Granted, this is merely a step on the way to the deepest level of self-exploration, which involves stepping as far out of emotional co-dependency as possible. Any form of relationship can become a spiral. But being fully authentic in your relationships (as opposed to hiding, lying, denying, etc.), is a great step in the right direction.

Mixers, Potlucks and Jealousy

The word polyamory is an umbrella term. It refers to no one particular relationship style, and the concept goes well beyond sex. At its essence it’s about love and relating, but the sexual aspect of relationships, including sexual feelings, is considered normal and is treated in a more open way. Sex is not ‘mandatory’ but it’s absolutely included.

There exist many methods and styles of polyamory; I will describe a few of them to the degree necessary to help you check whether you identify with one or more. My initial intent of this article (when I wrote it to be published locally) was to get some poly action going in the Hudson Valley. There are no groups here that I know of; nobody holding events. If you like the idea, I suggest you circulate it among your friends and get something going in your neighborhood as well. At least, you can get a conversation going.

For those who identify with these ideas but might hesitate, I can assure you that once a concept has made Newsweek, the Oxford English Dictionary and a dedicated blog on Psychology Today, it is sufficiently mainstream that you don’t have to mutter ‘I’m not so weird, I’m not so weird’ under your breath on the way to your first potluck dinner. This, by the way, I will host in my photo studio Valentine’s Day (contact instructions are at the end of this article). I’m also open to doing evening or day workshops (I have presented dozens of them — everywhere but locally.)

Name That Celebrity

Here is something you may not have thought of, vis-à-vis poly. We can all name gay and lesbian celebrities. Can you name one openly polyamorous celebrity?

Obviously they exist. But who are they?

Photo by Eric Francis.

Poly folk have a few odd things in common. We tend to be a bit bookish. We love a good theory; we tend to read and write about our way of life. A lot of talking is involved. There’s a fantasy among many that being poly is like one endless night in the old Penthouse mansion at the peak of the 1970s. Every now and then it might be, though usually it’s pretty different from that. Some of us consider ourselves social engineers, helping design and build better structures and concepts of human interaction. Most of us just want to love the way it’s natural for us to love.

The poly movement got its start in science fiction novels, particularly Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein. The upshot of that story is that a human born and raised on Mars by Martians (named Valentine Michael Smith), was returned to Earth by his foster parents. Being raised off-world, he lacked the typical human hang-ups (guilt, body shame, mendacity, limits imposed on his capacity to love) and, as a result, he manifested a very friendly scene around him. He was also a good kisser. A very interesting adventure ensued. It’s one of the books I’ll never forget and one of my inspirations for being a sci-fi and fantasy writer.

That was a book. It turns out that nonfiction humans are less monogamous than they claim to be, and that many of the ‘standard narratives’ are simply not supported by observation or genetic research. But the thing that makes a person polyamorous is being up front about that fact.

Jealousy, the Kids and Compersion

Then two questions always arise: What about jealousy? and, What about the kids?

Jealousy is a factor in most relationships, particularly monogamous ones. As we all know, presumed exclusivity does not address the issue itself. Usually it’s swept under the rug by the presumption of monogamy or by not telling one’s partner about an affair because ‘that would hurt them’. Polyamory takes jealousy as either therapeutic subject matter, or as a teacher (same basic idea). The issue is put right out onto the table. When you can look at it, it’s no longer the daunting monster that it seems to be when left in the closet. It becomes the basis of a growth and healing process designed to unearth and address the insecurity, envy and lack of self-esteem beneath the surface.

Photo by Eric Francis.

One of the first concepts that anyone stepping into polyamory finds out about is compersion. That is the experience of being turned on by the love and pleasure of the people you care about. Some say it’s the opposite of jealousy; I say it’s an alternate universe of a world where jealousy is a ubiquitous toxin. Compersion is like taking a Buddhist approach to relationships. It is an emotion, but it’s also an approach to existence. It is the equivalent in polyamorous relationships to oxygen in the biological world.

As for the kids, I don’t think that any conventional form of relationship can, in practice, claim to be inherently good for kids. Many of our parents who preached or attempted to follow the doctrine of monogamy had many extremely messy relationships, right in our faces. Rather, it’s how we conduct our relationships that matters: the content rather than the form. There are some truly functional marriages — but not all of them are, and it’s not marriage that makes the relationship functional. Not so long ago, sexual monogamy used to be set in the context of an extended family. There was always a sister, aunt, or uncle around to watch the kids. There was always company around. In many contemporary marriage-based households where two parents work, the kids are severely neglected. And if the parents don’t get along, the kids will suffer no matter how monogamous the parents are. If the parents are deceptive, the kids will know.

Most people practice what they call serial monogamy, which typically means instability and lack of real support that a more stable form of relationship would provide. That is not a good environment for kids. Many of us raised since the ’70s and ’80s are the products of this relationship style. Serial monogamy is a way of treating people like they’re disposable. Polyamory is a mode of relationship that, for many people, involves putting friendship first.

It provides a context in which to explore creative experiments. It’s designed to create a stable environment, which, if it does not automatically work, is at least workable. If polyamory can’t make a claim on sustainability, at least it is practical. The idea is to embrace conscious family and household design.

I admit this requires honesty and maturity, which can seem to be scarce commodities. In an old book called Bringers of the Dawn, the Pleiadian entities who are the purported source of the material make a good point. They say that humans are inherently polyamorous, but we have an integrity problem. Therefore, the most efficient form of relating is monogamy.

Thanks, guys. It’s nice to have a non-human perspective on this. Speaking as a person, I would say that we need to be who we are and along the way, open up and address the integrity issue. I’m not suggesting that anyone who is not polyamorous pretend to be so, and I’m not saying that it’s some kind of mandatory thing. What I am suggesting is that whoever feels the calling take the opportunity to get real. If you would like a guide to doing that, check out the book Radical Honesty by Brad Blanton. Not the later ones in the series — the first one, with a two-word title.

Triads, Panfidelity and Intimate Networks

In the space remaining, let me introduce you to three kinds of polyamorous relationships, to give a sense of the diversity of possibilities. I’m going to explain them in the first person, using I-statements for consistency. These are just three basic examples out of many possibilities, all of which are in truth unique to the people involved. They are all interesting, when you listen to the people who are involved.

The Triad. I’m in a pair-bonded couple. We’ve been together for a few years and have good clear communication. My partner meets a man she likes and begins seeing him socially. I encourage her to explore if she wants to; I’ve met him and I get along with him. She’s open about their experiences with me. They are both respectful of our primary partnership. They get closer and want to explore sexually. I’m open to this. Jealousy is not an issue because I think her sexuality is beautiful no matter how she expresses it. There are many other possibilities for triads, including situations where all three partners are sexually and emotionally involved, or live together (the real definition of ménage a trois).

Photo by Eric Francis.

Panfidelity. I am in a long-term relationship with my lover on the East Coast, where I live. I have a friend and sometimes lover on the West Coast who predates this relationship by years. We are close friends and have a deep understanding; what feels in truth like a lifelong bond. A few times a year, we meet up somewhere and spend time together. Our other relationships accommodate this because we’ve been open about it with new partners from the outset. There are other forms of panfidelity, which all involve long-term, committed polyamorous situations.

Intimate Network. I prefer to live independently. I have a number of friends, locally and around the country, with whom I am emotionally close and can be sexually open. I also have one or two ‘friends with benefits’. I enjoy closeness and sexual variety but I don’t want to be in a traditional pair-bonded situation or household-based relationship. I prefer my social freedom and I want to keep my options open.

What all the forms of relationship under the umbrella of polyamory have in common is an ethos of honesty and authenticity. Love is offered in a spirit of freedom, and when challenges arise, which they almost always do, the people involved are prepared to work them out. There are tools and resources that we can avail ourselves of, including a growing community of poly-friendly counselors. I’ve been tapped as a poly-friendly (and bi-friendly) astrologer for many years. If you’re poly and your therapist says you need to grow up or you’re acting out, I suggest you talk to someone who has a clue what your life is about.

As for That Valentine’s Day Potluck

Now for the local action piece. If you live in the Hudson Valley of New York, or somewhere close by and you feel like taking a ride, you’re invited to inquire about coming to my Valentine’s Day Poly Potluck. This will be Monday evening, Feb. 14. You may write to me at poly@bookofblue.com. Tell me a little about yourself and your interest in polyamory, and please include contact information. The curious are welcome.

By the way, I have a friend who is a well-studied astrologer and who is poly. She did a study reading the charts of poly people, to see what the successful ones had in common. Can you guess what it was?

The answer is a strong Saturn. That is astrological language for healthy boundaries.

Yours & truly,


Weekly Horoscope for Friday, February 11, 2011, #849 – BY ERIC FRANCIS

Eric’s Zodiac Sign Descriptions

Aries (March 20-April 19) — Are you at the end or the beginning? They’re closely connected. I suggest you take care of endings first. In particular, focus on any growth projects you’ve initiated the past seven years. There have been a few. Seven years is a while; dredge up the whole agenda, remembering the things you’ve forgotten. Take a look on your bookshelf for some ideas; take anything from the ‘self-help’ genre and remember your intention behind acquiring or reading that particular book. How many of the ideas did you put to work? If you take a subtle approach, you may discover that you applied more of them than you think. What you may not have done is assemble the various pieces into a cohesive notion of what you think growth or spiritual development is about. Pause and reflect — it will be obvious.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Aries, please go to this link.

Taurus (April 19-May 20) — The time has arrived to notice that you actually have dreams — specific dreams, not vague ones. While it’s true that manifesting the visions for what you want your life to be takes some action, mostly it takes focus. And all the action in the world will get you nowhere without a concept, an idea or an objective of some kind. You may need to go against your practical and/or humanitarian nature and choose something like ballet dancer, filmmaker, novelist or erotic party hostess. What you may encounter as you remember what you want is how much you wanted to do in the past that you didn’t get around to doing. Let go of your regrets quickly, so you can move on. Some of those dreams still have plenty of life in them — much more than you think.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Taurus, please go to this link.

Gemini (May 20-June 21) — Having tangible professional goals may not be one of your strengths. Having a healthy imagination about what you can potentially do, however, definitely is. Your planets this week offer two bold suggestions. One is to set a career goal based on a longstanding plan. The second is notice what happens when you focus and invoke your desire. Try it as a mental exercise. Concentrate on something you want, and sense how you feel. Do you feel clear, or do you feel guilty? Do you feel that the actual possibility is available, or do you hear any voices telling you that it’s not the right thing to do? You have an opportunity to claim back something that was taken from you. It seems like you’re taking it back from a collective of some kind, such as a church, your family or your circle of friends. Once you see the group psychology involved, you can claim what’s rightly yours.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Gemini, please go to this link.

Cancer (June 21-July 22) — I suggest you hold off on making contractual arrangements or initiating new collaborations for a few days, till the Sun is in Pisces. Stick to doing what you want to do, going where you want to go, and developing the abundant ideas that are running through your mind. Though you may not have noticed yet, your horizons just got a whole lot wider, and in truth those of the people around you are apt to be somewhat narrower. So keep your ideas to yourself; let them cook in your notebook or a document stashed off to the side of your screen. There are moments where something potent germinates, and you’re in one of them now. Honor that, and soak in the feeling of true creativity. Feel the movement and the shifting sense of perspective. Remember, you’ll feel more like you’re dancing than like you’re in church.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Cancer, please go to this link.

Leo (July 22-Aug. 23) — It’s amazing how many people are hurt. It just seems to go on and on, and most people you meet limp around on their injuries without paying attention to what’s going on. You have insight into their situations, but what’s more interesting is the insight they can give you into yours. Nearly all illness is caused by, or comes with, a delusion of some kind. It’s difficult to see one’s own delusions, but others around you are providing a kind of mirror. It’s not that you have their problems; it’s that you can apply to yourself the logic you use when you figure out what they have going on. Look at what the people around you believe that makes no sense, and look at what they think is funny. Everyone will become mysteriously transparent, and the issues (along with how to handle them) plainly obvious.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Leo, please go to this link.

Virgo (Aug. 23-Sep. 22) — Chiron has made its way into your opposite sign Pisces, where it will be every day from now until April 17, 2018. This represents an extended phase of your growth and exploration in relationships. It’s nearly coincidental with a seven-year phase that is ending, wherein you may have decided that relationships are either not dependable or too much trouble to bother with. It’s true, there is something well deserving of deep questioning. Yet you can be sure that your relationships from this point on will be taking on a new purpose. For a while there will be a phase where the themes of the old and new cycles overlap, and you’ll need to consciously choose who represents your past and who represents your future. That is a great skill to have. Practice while the contrasts are particularly bold.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Virgo, please go to this link.

Libra (Sep. 22-Oct. 23) — Your charts are telling me how close to the hot core of your reality you’re reaching these days. Whatever you may be experiencing, you’re very close to doing this thing called ‘finding yourself’. Yet at the same time you may have the sensation that you’re being forced to give something up. What exactly would that be? A combination of factors point to some deep emotional evolution. The theme involves a nexus of where commitment meets guilt meets the emotional dimension of your erotic nature. Whatever it may seem based on your circumstances, the thing you’re giving up is guilt. Straight away you can dismiss that this is a useful emotion. It is merely toxic and oppressive. It is not evidence of being wrong; it’s evidence that you were made to feel wrong. Encountering guilt in any form means you’re moving in the direction of your freedom. Keep going.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Libra, please go to this link.

Scorpio (Oct. 23-Nov. 22) — Your sign is most famous for its sexual prowess. Whether you feel you deserve this distinction is another question, but sex is quickly becoming the theme of your charts. I see this coming from two angles. One is that Chiron has ingressed Pisces, your 5th house of creative love and passion. The 5th is sexuality without any trace of power trip. Its purpose is pleasure and exploration. The other angle involves the viewpoint that a close partner (or potential partner) may be adopting, which is that sex has an important role to play in emotional healing. Most of that healing involves learning to feel deeply and to let go of guilt. The two positions are perfectly compatible. As you begin to see the ways in which your sexuality is changing, I suggest you assess carefully whether you’re with the right lover. You have a specific mission in these years, and your whole life must support that.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Scorpio, please go to this link.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22-Dec. 22) — Don’t worry, you’re not crazy. Your mind is not broken beyond repair, or broken at all, for that matter. And in case you don’t get reminders of this regularly, you’re more intelligent than you think, not less. What you would benefit from is learning the art of drawing light from dark; of letting uncertainty be a kind of foundation on which you build your sense of who you are. I know this sounds like a contradiction here on Planet Cocky. Insecurity is a reminder that life is transient; uncertainty is a reminder to pay attention, to take care of yourself and to reach for your goals from a deeper place. True confidence must always contain a bit of its opposite. This is precisely the opposite of stoking your fears. Rather, it’s giving them a productive use, tapping into energy that would otherwise be wasted.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Sagittarius, please go to this link.

Capricorn (Dec. 22-Jan. 20) — I suggest you be aware of a quality of polarization that may be developing in your life. There are a few possibilities for how this might feel. One is that you are struggling to reconcile your professional life and your home life. Both want attention but you feel like you have to give more attention to one. Here’s a thought about that particular polarity. You’ve made some tremendous strides professionally the past two years. I say this knowing you may have faced some significant crises and growing pains. But the main lesson you’ve learned is that you’re a lot more than a survivor. So I suggest you honor the calling in the direction of home, and in the direction of your interior life. You will refresh who you are, and one side benefit will be a wealth of ideas that help you build your fortunes.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Capricorn, please go to this link.

Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb. 19) — You may be feeling like you’ve got some serious self-improvement to do. I suggest you not fall for this trap. The notion of ‘making yourself a better person’ is not like going to the gym. When people grow, the main thing that changes is their perspective. Often that perspective involves taking a more compassionate view of what’s happened to you in the past. There’s also the step of not inflicting what has happened to you onto others. What you may be experiencing are the remnants of psychological abuse, as well as some form of betrayal. If you have the feeling that ‘something is going to come back to you’, you know you’ve got the thing right in your hand. The part about expecting karma to bite you on the ass is a direct outgrowth of the abuse. It is not the truth. It is, however, a thought form, and with a little awareness, you can unravel it. Writing to someone is likely to help.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Aquarius, please go to this link.

Pisces (Feb. 19-March 20) — Chiron arrived in your sign earlier in the week, and Neptune (the modern ruler of your sign) is on its way. You may have the sensation of standing out; you may not appreciate the attention you’re getting. While you’ve often lamented feeling invisible, there’s a kind of psychological — or maybe it’s emotional — sensation of safety in not being seen. There is more going on than you think. What you’re actually doing is negotiating a new position in the world. Your ego structure is taking a new shape. The inner light that can shine through a healthy ego is coming in stronger. And this is going to alter your relationship to the people around you. For a while their responses may be more intense than usual, or seem a little weird. Take it in stride and keep remembering who you are.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Pisces, please go to this link.

———

Something About Egypt

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Planet Waves

Infrared photo of the Great Sphinx by Sarite Sanders.

Dear Friend and Reader:

There are three things to keep in mind about Egypt at this juncture, while its destiny is now being slugged out on the streets of Cairo with clubs and Molotov cocktails. One is how old the place is. I believe the oldest relics of human creation on Earth can be found there. Archeologists are starting to figure out that their estimates of the age of the Sphinx, for example, were a little on the low side. The thing was being repaired during the Old Kingdom, so it may have been there before what we think of as Egypt showed up.

Sarite Sanders has been photographing Egyptian antiquities since the 1970s. She said that while Egypt has gone through numerous difficult periods, “There was an overseeing principle that the pharaoh represented that spread throughout the religious cultural orders. There was an understanding. The king was the embodiment of a divine principle of justice and truth. He was the intermediary between the people and the principal god, Ra. We look to the king archetype to uphold the highest good and to sacrifice himself for that good. We don’t see that in Mubarak,” she said of the American-backed dictator who by refusing to leave office has pushed the country to the brink of revolution.

Headless quartzite statue of King Amenesse in the Hypostyle Hall in the Temple of Karnak in Luxor (the former Thebes). The matching head is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Sarite Sanders.

The second is how significant it is that the people are now standing up to more than three decades of dictatorship, ready to risk everything. For many years the country has been kept in a state of tyranny by a secret police force that has oppressed a population so poor many people don’t have clean water. The uprising is a sign that the disparities between the rich and the poor grew so absurd that anti-government protesters had nothing to lose. As the gap grows to the size of a canyon many places throughout the world, these events are sending chills down the spines of world leaders who know you cannot suppress all of the people all of the time.

The third is that the Suez Canal runs through Egypt (which is in northern Africa), connecting the Red Sea with the Mediterranean Sea. The canal makes it possible to get from the East to the West without going around the southern tip of Africa. This one little artery is the supply line for food and oil for much of the world. Egypt has one of the most strategic locations on the planet, and under the current treaty, the canal may be used in times of war or peace, by any ship that can pay the toll to get through. Notably, that includes a lot of oil tankers.

Last week, protests erupted across the country, with people pouring into the streets demanding the ouster of Pres. Hosni Mubarak, who has ruled since Anwar Sadat was assassinated in 1981. Under his reign and long before, Egypt has been a client state of the United States, providing stability in the Middle East’s most populous country at the cost of people who have little to eat and to whom pennies handed to them by tourists are actually meaningful.

As the pressure built, Mubarak responded to the biggest protests in the country’s history Monday night by promising that he would not seek re-election when his term is up in September. He then told the protesters to go home. When they refused to leave, the official goon squads started working overtime, and mobs of pro-government thugs were unleashed, with horses, camels, clubs and firebombs. After provoking this violence, Mubarak then claimed the anti-government protests had turned violent and had to be suppressed — which is about where the situation stands as we go to press Friday morning. So far the Egyptian army has not opened fire on protesters, but many fear that if the situation becomes increasingly violent, they will do so.

[Friday morning, The New York Times was reporting that 100,000 Egyptians had packed Cairo’s central Tahir Square waging a “largely peaceful” campaign for the removal of Mubarak. Meanwhile, the government waged a broad, violent crackdown on journalists and human rights activists. For excellent television coverage of these events, including analysis of why Mubarak has ordered attacks on journalists, I recommend watching Thursday’s Rachel Maddow Show. Also of note, Politico Playbook reported Friday morning that, President Obama “has said that now is the time to begin a peaceful, orderly and meaningful transition, with credible, inclusive negotiations. We have discussed with the Egyptians a variety of different ways to move that process forward, but all of those decisions must be made by the Egyptian people…It’s simply wrong to report that there’s a single U.S. plan that’s being negotiated with the Egyptians.”]

Some are tracing the Egyptian revolts to an incident Dec. 17 wherein a young Tunisian named Mohamed Bouazizi self-immolated, setting off protests in his country that led to the ouster of its longtime dictator. Bouazizi was protesting poverty — specifically, the confiscation of his wares and the humiliation that was inflicted on him by a female municipal official. That chart has Pholus on the midheaven (the government angle) — just like the chart for when Jared Loughner opened fire on the crowd in Tucson, AZ, a month ago. Both events represented a release of pressure that could not be put back into containment. The Tunisian chart led to an actual revolution, pushing its dictator out of office and emboldening Egyptians to stand up to Mubarak.

Pyramid of Khafre, on the Giza Plateau on the edge of Cairo, with the Sphinx in the foreground. Photo by Sarite Sanders.

In the weeks following Bouazizi’s suicide, several Egyptians lit themselves on fire and protests there began to gather momentum. Since then, they have also rippled into Jordan, Yemen, Sudan and Algeria. CNN reported Thursday that opposition movements in Syria are calling for mass protests against the rule of its president, Bashar al-Assad. So we suddenly have the entire region in turmoil and sweeping transition.

I would note that with the situation in Egypt emerging, we have seen another example of the war being taken to the Internet. Egyptian authorities ordered ISPs and cellular phone carriers to cut off services so that protesters could not use them to organize. This is the second incident in as many months where the Net has become a battleground — the prior was when WikiLeaks had its domain and servers taken away by the U.S. government. The respective governments didn’t stop the Egyptian people from revolting and they didn’t stop WikiLeaks.

There’s one last little thing about Egypt — it’s a kind of cosmic amplifier, a vortex that broadcasts vibrations to the rest of the world. Perhaps it’s the ley lines, perhaps it’s some feature associated with the Great Pyramid, but anyone who’s been there can tell you — there’s just something about Egypt.

Astrological Context: Epochs of Revolution

We’ve known for a long time that big changes are brewing in the world. Numerous ongoing transits that would have massive and sweeping effects in any event are now concentrated around the cardinal points (early Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn, also known as the Aries Point), which is magnifying the effect. The lunar nodes are backing toward the first degrees of Cancer and Capricorn; we just had an eclipse right there, and numerous slow-moving planets have been dancing around on the early cardinal cross since Pluto showed up in 2008. All of this adds up to what we’re seeing now — except that the momentum is just picking up.

On Tuesday in Cairo, Christians protecting Muslims during their evening prayers. Photo by Nevine Zaki.

It’s easy to recognize the revolutionary spirit vibrating across the Middle East as characteristc of the Uranus-Pluto cycle that’s about to reach the first peak since the mid-1960s: that is the Uranus-Pluto square, which will be exact for the first time in June 2012.

This cycle began with the Uranus-Pluto conjunction that was exact in 1965-66 and which spread out for about five years in either direction. The energy of our current moment is in the same spirit — with one exception. The conjunction in the Sixties was in the relatively mellow, intellectual, service-oriented sign Virgo. The square aspect that we’re now experiencing involves Uranus in Aries and Pluto in Capricorn — fast-action cardinal signs, with the Aries Point directly involved. At the moment, we also have Jupiter sitting right there, magnifying things and — notably — exactly square the lunar nodes, additional hints as to the scale of events and how many people are involved, or will be involved as this turning point develops.

As astro-historian Richard Tarnas has noted, the conjunction, square and opposition aspects of Uranus and Pluto have a wide orb of influence, and then events intensify and come into focus as the aspect reaches its exact contact. Events then continue to develop long after the aspect has begun to separate (which won’t begin to happen until 2015).

Tarnas describes times in history when, at peak moments in the Uranus-Pluto cycle, revolution spread faster than the mail could travel. While it’s probably not possible for news to move quicker than Twitter, we now have a similar experience of uprisings rippling out across a wide region of the world, notably, one that has long been oppressed.

In his 2006 book Cosmos and Psyche, Tarnas describes the cycle of Uranus and Pluto, which leads to “epochs of revolution,” giving many examples. One was the Uranus-Pluto conjunction of 1850, “coincident with the wave of revolutionary upheavals that took place in almost every capital of Europe in 1848-49: Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, Dresden, Baden, Prague, Rome, Milan. Again one sees the sudden eruption of a collective revolutionary impulse affecting an entire continent with mass insurrections, the emergence of radical political and social movements, revolts for nationalist independence, and the abrupt overthrow of governments throughout Europe.”

Firebombs on a rooftop in Tahrir Square: American-branded weapons for the professional thugs? This week, Ministry of Interior secret police were being paid 50 Egyptian pounds a day (about $10) to incite violence against peaceful anti-government protesters. Photo: Ed Ou / NY Times.

Intellectual developments were on fire at the same time: “Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto, Henry David Thoreau wrote On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman led anti-slavery efforts in the United States, and the women’s rights movement began with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.”

Strikingly similar phases took place during the French revolutionary era and at the turn of the 20th century, all of them marked by Uranus-Pluto aspects. The Sixties of course were described as a time when there was “music in the cafes at night and revolution in the air.” Protest movements sprang up across the United States and Europe, and there were breakthroughs in science, law, music, the arts and social movements as well. There was plenty of push-back against the forces of progress, with the assassinations of Medgar Evers, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy — and later, John Lennon and civil rights activist Allard K. Lowenstein.

Tarnas notes, “These alignments did not mark years in which the characteristic historical events and cultural trends suddenly turned on and then off, when the alignment was over, like bivalent light switches.

“Rather, the periods in question seemed to represent times when continuing, usually long-developing trends came to a boil, as it were; when a certain heightened stimulus or concrete fruition brought specific categories of cultural phenomena to conspicuous expression, causing those tendencies to emerge more explicitly and dramatically into the collective consciousness. From that more decisive point of inception or climax, those cultural tendencies then continued to unfold in diverse ways in subsequent years and decades after the alignment was over.”

The current alignment is not only not over — it’s just getting warmed up. The first exact meeting of the square in June 2012 is coincident with the Venus transit of the Sun, and six months later we have the turnover of the Mayan calendar.

The Chart of Egypt

Back in the 1980s, one of my very favorite cartoonists, Tom Toles (then at the Buffalo News) drew a map of the “Muddle East.” It had countries like Irant and Irave. Toles must have been looking at the astrological chart for Egypt when he gave it the name Edgy.

Chart for the Republic of Egypt. You can see the placement of Chiron in orange at the top of the chart.
For additional charts of Egypt, see this link.

Countries have many charts, but the one for the latest incarnation of government is usually dependable. This would be the Arab Republic of Egypt, founded in 1953. This event followed the overthrow of King Fouad II the same year.

Edgy is the perfect description for this chart, with the very last degree of Aries rising, and two centaur planets in the house of government. Chiron in particular is pressed right against the 10th house cusp, the house that represents the president himself — in Capricorn, the sign of both government and antiquity. I can hardly imagine a more fitting image for the modern government of a country that can rightly trace its roots back more than 5,000 years.

Chiron retrograde on the 10th house looks like a claim to the past, or something from the past coming back to visit in the present. No doubt everyone who has ever ruled Egypt has compared himself to the pharaohs. Chiron in that position is a placement that’s constantly being confronted by tests, pointing to an injury to executive power. Anwar Sadat, who was assassinated in 1981, stands as a haunting presence inside that Chiron. When Sadat was killed and Mubarak took power, the Sun, Saturn and Jupiter in Libra were all square that Chiron in Capricorn. Now, Saturn is back there squaring Chiron from Libra, and Jupiter will soon square Chiron from Aries.

Pholus (the second centaur) in Aquarius is close by, directly on the North Node. This has the feeling of compelling, volatile, wild populism that was bound to burst out sooner or later — we are seeing it now. Pholus represents the uncontainable force, and in Aquarius that’s about the people of the country. Remember, too that it comes with the idea ‘small cause, big effect’, and it seems to keep showing up lately.

The clash between pro- and anti-Mubarak supporters escalated in Tahrir Square, Cairo, on Feb. 2. A Molotov cocktail set a tree ablaze, which spread to a building nearby. Photo: Ann Hermes/The Christian Science Monitor.

Aquarius often makes a commentary on technology. It’s more than interesting that when the government tried to cut off the power to the citizens, it went for cellular phones and the Internet first — but that Pholus only came out with more force, making people more determined to do what they knew was necessary.

Next, look at the Sun at 27+ Gemini. First, a little synchronicity: the Sun of modern Egypt is conjunct the Moon of the Sept. 11, 2001 chart. There seems to be a connection. Maybe that’s reminding us that Mohammed Atta, the alleged leader of the plot and the guy who supposedly crashed Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, had an Egyptian passport. With friends like these, who needs conspiracy theories? And remember that 15 of the other supposed hijackers had passports of our other great allies in the Arabian theater, the Saudis. When an act of war is staged on friendly territory, for some reason I mutter false flag under my breath a few times.

Anyway, back to astrology. In a national chart, the Sun is a representative of the leader of a nation (there will be several such symbols in the chart for a country) though for Egypt the Sun is particularly poignant — it’s a country where the Sun gods are beloved. It’s now being squared by Uranus making its last pass through late Pisces. Uranus square the Sun is the same aspect that took down Richard Nixon. The Sun in this chart is being trined by Chiron and Neptune, suggesting that there’s a way to healing if people are interested in finding it. There always is, but the interest level is the variable. It’s easy to make noise and it’s difficult to run a country. That trine also represents the venting of pent-up pressure.

As for the role of the military: that is a 6th house matter, and Virgo is on the 6th cusp. The Moon is right there, conjunct its own osculating apogee (Black Moon Lilith, the little crescent with a cross). The Moon’s presence speaks of the reputed closeness between the Egyptian army and the people (often represented by the Moon in a public chart) though there is a dark side. The relationship is not stable and it’s subject to corruption. There is something two-faced going on here. Virgo’s ruler is Mercury, and this we find in Cancer (again, a reference to the people) and square Neptune and Saturn. Mercury is making a lot of aspects, and notably it is in mutual reception to the Moon — they occupy one another’s signs, and are in aspect. It’s almost as if the military plays any role that is convenient at the moment.

For now the situation is entirely up for grabs. The standoff has continued through the high-pressure Aquarius New Moon conjunct Ceres and Mars — and the tension is continuing to build.

Something About That Canal

After Rachel Maddow gave a brief presentation on the Suez Canal the other night, I got curious and tracked down the date that it opened. There are no references to time that I could find on the Internet, but the day will serve for this discussion. That was Nov. 16, 1869.

Progressed horoscope for the Suez Canal. Notice the concentration of planets in Aries in the 7th house, and the cardinal points occupying the chart’s mundane angles. For the natal and the progressed charts in a larger format, check this link.

Notably this was not the first canal through the Suez isthmus. Napoleon found the remnants of an old one, and Herodotus wrote that one early effort to dig between the two seas led to the deaths of “twelve myriads” of Egyptians — that is, 120,000 people.

The chart for the canal opening presents an interesting picture. For example, it has Mars/Saturn trine Moon/Neptune as a nice image of having to dig and blast through solid matter (that’s Mars/Saturn), connecting two large regions of the world (Sagittarius style) through which water and tides will flow (Moon/Neptune). Moon and Neptune are in Aries; the canal is handy in time of world war, as well as for getting figs and silk to Canada.

In the Egyptian spirit of edgy, Chiron is retrograde in the very last degree of the zodiac. This project took a lot of vision to get done, and you can be sure that everyone since King Tut’s grampappy wanted to make it happen. Jupiter is conjunct Pluto — that vision verged on religious zeal. The project took 10 years.

But the chart for the canal that rang all the bells popped up when I did the progressions. I’ve written thousands of editions of Planet Waves and I’ve somehow managed to avoid any real discussion of the progressed horoscope.

Perspective of Suez Canal, from Tour Egypt website.

Progressions are different from transits, which are real planets buzzing around the Sun. Progressions are when you start with a natal chart of some kind and then advance the planets one day per year, up to the present time. It’s a scale model of time. (There are several scales you can work with — day per year is the most commonly used, and the method I use advances the ascendant one degree per day.) If you start with a chart from 1869 and advance it to 2011, you would be adding about 142 days to the original chart to represent the 142 years that the canal has been open.

I started with a noon chart, so there is potentially some loss of precision — having an exact time is, under the rules of progression, helpful. But sometimes you get a really interesting chart seemingly out of the blue, and the current progressed chart for the Suez Canal certainly qualifies. Have a look. It’s one of those charts you don’t even need to be an astrologer to read; it’s so obviously about a concentration of power.

Where this roulette wheel stopped, the four angles came up on the cardinal points — the Aries Point. Maybe I’m just an Aries Point magnet or something but then look at all those planets and points in Aries, in the 7th house: the Vertex, Chiron, Mercury, Mars, Juno, the Sun, Neptune and the Black Moon Lilith.

The 7th is the house of both partners and of open enemies, and the sign involved is Aries, home to the god of war. Even if nobody is saying this on the nightly news, whatever is brewing behind the scenes is all about that canal.

To be continued.

Yours & truly,

Happy Chinese New Year

Yesterday marked the beginning of the Chinese New Year: the Year of the Rabbit or Hare. Or, in the Vietnamese system, the Cat.

Bugs Bunny, seen this week in Times Square, ushers in the Year of the Wabbit.

If you’re wondering how the Rabbit and Cat got paired up, it comes down to phonetics. According to Wikipedia, “In the related Vietnamese cat takes the place of the rabbit. The Chinese character 卯 for the Rabbit sounds like (mão, mẫu, méo, mẹo, mẻo); the word “mèo” is cat in Vietnamese. Therefore, cat was translated from Chinese to Vietnamese as fourth zodiac sign instead of Rabbit.”

In both cases, people born under the animal in question tend to be described as calm, hospitable, kind, and often graciously diplomatic or empathetic. Both cats and rabbits land on their feet when they fall.

General predictions for 2011 run along the lines of a calm, peaceful year — a time to rest after the tumultuous Year of the Tiger — but so far, the world news does not seem to be bearing this out. Of course, while we are a whole month into 2011, we are only one day into the Year of the Rabbit-Cat. So there is certainly time for the pace to slow a bit.

That said, chiff.com does indicate a bit of contradiction between the Year of the Rabbit on a personal level as opposed to what we see on the world stage:

“The year of the Rabbit is traditionally associated with home and family, artistic pursuits, diplomacy, and keeping the peace. Therefore, 2011 is very likely to be a relatively calmer one than 2010 both on the world scene, as well as on a personal level.

“Conversely, nations will also become more insular and increasingly lock down their borders to protect against the “other”. However, 2011 will also see new art movements projecting a distinct national identity taking the world by storm. Shrewd and creative new business partnerships will also form to the benefit of all.”

Watch this cat transform into a rabbit.

This combination of “new art movements… taking the world by storm” and nations locking down does seem to echo the revolutionary spirit getting fired up by the Uranus-Pluto square — and the reactions of the ‘powers that be’. The writer at chiff.com continues:

“Rabbits who thrive on delicate business dealings are best suited to navigating the year ahead. Others will suffer, by degree, depending on how flexible they are to the world mood. Those who have cultivated careful negotiation skills (or, perhaps more importantly, can sniff-out and swiftly dodge dangerous situations!), may attain similar good luck enjoyed by rabbits and those compatible with them in 2011.”

At theholidayspot.com however, we find that this year will be, “A congenial time in which diplomacy, international relations and politics will be given a front seat again. We will act with discretion and make reasonable concessions without too much difficulty.”

We will, will we? Perhaps somebody should forward the article to President Mubarak STAT. After all, this is the year in which “Law and order will be lax; rules and regulations will not be rigidly enforced. No one seems very inclined to bother with these unpleasant realities. They are busy enjoying themselves, entertaining others or simply taking it easy.” There may a few other world leaders out there who need to see the memo, too.

And if you were born in any of the years 1915, 1927, 1939, 1951, 1963, 1975, 1987, or 1999 but suddenly feel a bit panicky as to whether you feel more like a Rabbit or a Cat (I know it may be a bit much to handle after recently being told that your western zodiac sign is wrong), take heart. You can always make like this clever critter and claim both.

Weekly Horoscope for Friday, February 4, 2011, #848 – BY ERIC FRANCIS

Eric’s Zodiac Sign Descriptions

Aries (March 20-April 19) — This is a rare moment to break free and be yourself. True, astrology textbooks say you don’t have this problem — after all you’re an Aries. I don’t believe in astrology that much. We are all human and most of us were raised on television, thinking the Nike swoosh is cool. Closer to the point, most people actually believe that if they speak up, they will be rejected by their friends and cause trouble amongst their coworkers. I don’t mean speaking up about being a Red Sox fan in New York. I mean about things that really matter. You may be inclined to do this, and if you do, you’re in for a surprise, which is that when you make your real feelings and ideas known, you’re likely to discover that people respect you more, not less. I would note that the important thing is that you put your self-respect first.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Aries, please go to this link.

Taurus (April 19-May 20) — We usually think of opportunity in quaint terms as one’s ship coming in, or getting the big break. I suggest you begin with considering what you’re doing now, this very moment, as the vortex of the potent energy of opportunity that is pulsing through your existence. This astrology is not something in the future; it’s about right now. If you have ideas for what you want to be doing, what are they and what can you do about the most meaningful ones right now? The sensation you have doing this may have a hint of ‘feeling like you’re someone else’. You may indeed be in a process of learning by example, though Venus in Capricorn suggests that though you may indeed be collaborating or learning from someone else, you’re in the perfect spot to be practical, resourceful and soulful about whatever you try out.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Taurus, please go to this link.

Gemini (May 20-June 21) — If you could go anywhere in the world right now, where would that be? Would you drop in on Cairo with a camcorder and satellite phone? Would you be working for the hacker group Anonymous, spreading revolutionary information? Would you be working for a big high-tech firm like Google, plotting the next stage of the Internet? Would you be working on some visionary, humanitarian project that allowed you to express your spiritual values in direct ways? Would you get involved in your community, putting to use the idea, ‘think globally, act locally’? I suggest you pause and consider your highest ideals and whether you’re ready to act on them. While you’re doing that, pause and look around at the world and notice what you want to do the most. Far less is in your way than you think.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Gemini, please go to this link.

Cancer (June 21-July 22) — This is the time to renegotiate the terms of your existence. You seem to want a new way to think about your commitments, and those of the people you’re involved with. The concepts of relationship that you grew up with are falling apart, and not just for you. For one thing they are not based on any notion of equality or even equanimity. They are way too structured and depend on formality more than authenticity. Yet in the midst of all those issues, there is something worth preserving; something old-fashioned that still has use today. You can think of this as the living spirit inside a tradition rather than the tradition itself. This thing, whatever it is, predates the relics of marriage as a business arrangement and ongoing attempts to possess another person that permeate so many cultures. How about this: the enduring nature of love.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Cancer, please go to this link.

Leo (July 22-Aug. 23) — Focus is the key to not being overwhelmed. Focus on what you want, and on the people who are present and willing to help you have that, without throwing up any static or noise. While you’re busy engaging with so much that is in your environment, I suggest you tune into one long-term change that may be in the background of your life that you have lost track of, or set aside for the future. It’s time is about to arrive, and it’s going to change very nearly everything in your life. By change, I mean deepen, rearrange and take to a new level. The living essence of all of these changes is cooperation. Yet what is different is that this is a form of cooperation that will take you to the edges of where you feel safe, verging into an authentic vulnerability that you may go out of your way to avoid. This is one among many emotional tendencies that you’re about to leave behind.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Leo, please go to this link.

Virgo (Aug. 23-Sep. 22) — By the time you convince yourself that it’s okay to really get involved in a rapidly developing situation, the action may have subsided. I understand that your commitment is a precious thing, though this preciousness also provides a cover story for a kind of annoying reticence that you’ve long had to contend with. What you’re really committing to is having an opinion or idea that you’re willing to state openly rather than merely contemplate. You may be concerned that if you say anything directly, you won’t be allowed to change your mind. That’s not true, but you’ll just need to say that’s what you’re doing. Closer to home is why you wonder so much what people might think about what you think. Once you call back the projection, you’ll see that this is nothing other than self-doubt. And the only thing you can do about that is take a chance on your own intelligence.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Virgo, please go to this link.

Libra (Sep. 22-Oct. 23) — Sex is an aesthetic and emotional experience, though it has an intellectual aspect that is strong in your chart any day, and it’s particularly strong now. What you have is an opportunity to break free from your own ideology and recognize the beauty of what desire is, and what it can do for you. If you look around you’ll notice the extent to which people are in a kind of war with desire, and play an approach-avoid game with what they want the most. I wasn’t around when some monks were making up Buddhism, but I know about the damage that guilt can do, and how good it feels to let guilt go. What we all need to contemplate, and what I suggest you consider, is the perceived value of guilt. Besides being a convenient way to punish ourselves for what was done to us in the past, guilt seems to be a hedge against the perceived anarchy that would ensue if we decided to take a good deep breath and let it out.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Libra, please go to this link.

Scorpio (Oct. 23-Nov. 22) — You can now get to the bottom of your feelings, your fears, your insecurities — enough to let go of the control you impose on yourself. I suggest that be your goal; to live without so many attempts to quantify, influence and manipulate what you feel. This includes all attempts to adapt to what others feel, rather than admitting how you’re responding to that and doing something about it on your own terms. To the extent you do this, you’re merely living out the control dramas of your family of origin. That’s why it feels like such a struggle to break free: part of your emotional body is still trapped back in the space and time when everyone else has all the power. I have news for you: they don’t. But that’s different than you admitting you have any influence at all, or the ability to make a decision based exclusively on your own needs. If you’re still fighting your parents, that will feel like defiance. If you’re living your life, it will feel like something creative.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Scorpio, please go to this link.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22-Dec. 22) — We could sum up the Aries Point as ‘the personal is political’, though a more relevant way to say the same thing is that action is the fruit of knowledge. You now know something; you have no doubts at all. You don’t need any other supporting evidence or information and you don’t need all these people around you expressing their various opinions. You don’t need any predictions or additional analysis. You need to decide what, exactly, you’re going to do with the information you have. Now, you may well have decided, and if that is true I suggest you either tune out the noise, or appoint someone you care about to be the scribe and present you with the data in refined form, without anyone’s emotional charge stuck to it. Your life is calling you, and you’re answering. Don’t let anything or anyone slow you down.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Sagittarius, please go to this link.

Capricorn (Dec. 22-Jan. 20) — Money has been an issue for you, and this goes back years. How much of what you’re going through actually involves money and how much involves your ideas about it? How much is about resources and how much is about whether you feel you’re worthy of success. Yet what exactly is success? It’s closely related to your sense of belonging on the planet. What I will call the ‘crisis stage’ of your financial life is rapidly waning away. Even as it does, I suggest you claim your space and claim your value — to yourself. That will shift your energy out of crisis mode and into take-charge mode faster than anything. Remember that you’re not making up a story when you do this. You are affirming what is so. (Most of the old stuff was a story about wounded self-esteem that you’re finally ready to let go of.)

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Capricorn, please go to this link.

Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb. 19) — You may be discovering how not-so-subtle the changes you’re going through are. Very nearly forever, you were busy getting ready, unhitching the connection points to the past, considering what is important to you and so forth. You spent a good bit of time waiting around. Now the scenario of the past year is making a lot more sense — and you know that the next step is up to you. The delusions that were flying around under your hat and inside your dress are still near you, but they have no power whatsoever when you recognize that the course of your life is something that you and you alone decide. Don’t get lost in theory on this one. Look at your options and choose from among them — and if you don’t like any of them, make up a few others. The feeling tone you’re going for is nourishing.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Aquarius, please go to this link.

Pisces (Feb. 19-March 20) — This is an edgy time for you — as I write, there are about a dozen planets and points gathered in your 12th house, and a New Moon conjunct Mars brewing. That would be enough to make the Dalai Lama paranoid. Recognize that you’re under some unusual pressure, which you may not have noticed building and which will begin to dissipate soon enough. In fact it already has, but the tension will really break when Chiron enters your sign in a few days. The truth is, you’ve been under a lot of pressure for a long time, and just like one ascends from scuba diving gradually so as not to get the bends, I suggest you let the psychic pressure you’ve been under release itself gradually. Meanwhile, don’t let it distract you from what an amazing moment this is for you, in so many ways.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Pisces, please go to this link.

———

You Are Who You Are

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Dear Friend and Reader:

Last week’s ‘Your Sign Is Wrong’ hoax that spread like feathers at a pillow fight was a rare trip through the news for the craft of astrology. Every now and then our old profession gathers a little attention, usually due to a misunderstanding or a prediction someone has made. Once it happened because a president’s wife was discovered to have been using an astrologer. This time, once again, it was because an astronomer announced that the dates for the Sun signs were wrong. The whole show added up to an interesting social experiment.

Can’t you tell? I’m still a Pisces! From the Astrological Bodies series.

I got several requests for comment from newspapers, and was quoted by the Associated Press and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune (which did the story that went viral, rewriting a barely noticed earlier story). Yet other places ran TV segments on the issue without even consulting an astrologer. Since this is a story that is all about astrology, you don’t have to be a media critic to realize that’s a little weird. Often astrologers seem doomed to the fate of prostitutes — to be regarded as invisible. But we forget that the likes of Ben Franklin, Sir Isaac Newton and Johannes Kepler were astrologers.

“You don’t go to a plumber to ask how to remove a spleen. The fact that they’ve gone to astronomers and taken their word as gospel is quite biased,” said Diana Brownstone, a New York City-based astrologer. She said CBS News contacted her, then said they pulled the story because they couldn’t find an astronomer to be on the program. Then they ran it anyway, with neither an astrologer nor an astronomer commenting — just their usual pundits. This kind of free-form coverage resulted in a diversity of delightfully know-nothing statements such as, “The shift isn’t new, [astronomer Parke] Kunkle says — the zodiac world just hasn’t taken the wobble into account.” The zodiac world? How would they know? How many astrologers did they talk to?

More accurate pieces got traction in the alternative media and in the blogs, which pretty much called the issue what it was — misinformation at best. But with an extra 80,000 people finding my “The World is Flat” article as a result of the fuss, I was having a lot of fun.

An Identity Crisis?

Most interesting was the panic that ensued with the release of this news. Plenty of people actually took seriously the notion that they might be someone else because of a vast cosmic error. The news created a kind of astrological identity crisis that had far more reach than the efforts of astrology to clarify the issue.

And she is still a Leo.

One frantic reader of Yahoo news wrote, “What I don’t understand, and is kinda freaking me out is that everyone sign seem to have changed, but mines is still the same. Whats up with that?? Should I be worried???”

In addition to sparking chaos in the lives of those who have heard of astrology but not astrologers, another result was to immerse our mysterious craft into even deeper murky depths of mystery than usual. But it also brought attention to astrology, it revealed how much people really do identify with the stuff, and it raises an interesting technical issue that has some cool possibilities for creative play.

The bottom line on this is that astrology is a symbolic system borrowing from many traditions. There are lots of these systems, and there are many forms of astrology. The issue is not whether one method or technique is right or wrong, no more than Korean food is inherently better than Japanese food. It’s all about the chef, the ingredients and the company at dinner. Divination systems don’t tell you who you are; they provide a way to help you discover some possibilities. As for astrology, there are many factors other than the Sun sign. I’ve never heard of anyone panicking because they found out they had a Moon sign.

However, finding out about the Year of the Mouse has some people on edge.

Let’s take this edition and sort out a few of the issues involved. I covered some of them briefly last week. There were two relatively minor errors in my original story that I will clarify.

Here is something to keep in mind: you’ve already heard about one of the central issues involved, long before last week. You’ve sung at least a few lines from one particular song that was inspired by a phenomenon being described.

The curve thrown to astrologers and their readers last week was double, and by the way, it was a gag approximately as original as a Whoopee Cushion. First, there was the assertion that due to changes in the Earth-Sun alignment, all the signs are out of whack. The other was astronomers adding (once again) a supposed ’13th sign’ to the zodiac — Ophiuchus. They are at once different and related. Like all good lies, both have a basis in truth. Notably, they have appeared separately, but to my knowledge, not together. So that was sort of original; the Whoopee Cushion meets the exploding cigarette.

Let’s take the issues one at a time.

There Are Two Zodiacs

Without going too deeply into the factually mucky ‘your sign is wrong’ rumor, it basically went like this. Because of changes in the Earth-Sun alignment over the past 2,000 years, all the signs we use are out of whack with the constellations. The ancient Babylonians allegedly ‘intended’ for the meaning of your sign to come from the actual constellation of stars associated with the name of the sign, with which it once aligned; but now due to the Earth wobbling on its axis, the whole system has drifted. Therefore (presumably) your sign is wrong.

The tropical zodiac is in the inner wheel, the sidereal zodiac is in the outer wheel. The inner wheel includes the tropical signs, the seasons, and the calendar. It spins inside the sidereal zodiac because the Earth wobbles like a top.

Let’s forget that back in Babylon there were no newspaper horoscopes, and psychological astrology (what we do today) was waiting for the 20th century to come along. People were probably not chirping ‘what’s your sign?’ at ancient Babylonian cocktail parties.

Anyway, here is the basis in truth. There are two zodiacs. Every reasonably serious astrology student and many casual readers know this. One is called the Western or tropical zodiac (the one commonly used in the United States, the UK, Europe, Australia and elsewhere). The other is called the Vedic or sidereal zodiac (the one used in India). They are part of surprisingly similar systems with many common symbols and are grounded in the same basic concepts, such as the number 12. Both have four elements (earth, air, fire, water) and three triplicities, or types of sign (cardinal, fixed, mutable).

However, the starting point of the sidereal horoscope is measured based on the constellations, and the tropical zodiac is measured based on the seasons. Sidereal means stellar and tropical means based on the tropics, which is how we measure the four seasons.

The ancient Babylonians knew about — and likely developed — both systems; we don’t know which is older, except we do have a clue. Back in Babylon (modern day Iraq, also called ancient Chaldean civilization), agriculture, which depends on the seasons, was an important consideration. It was so important that the Chaldeans are credited with inventing writing so they could record farming methods for later generations. The tropical zodiac was used as a device to measure the seasons — as it is today.

The tropical zodiac begins with something called the Aries Point. You’ve heard this term a lot here; it’s sensitive, because it’s the place where the two zodiacs are reckoned. The Aries Point (also called the Sidereal Vernal Point or SVP) means ‘the apparent position of the Sun on the first day of spring’. Its position is the first degree of the tropical wheel. We measure everything in the tropical zodiac from there. For example, yesterday was the first day of the Sun in Aquarius; the Sun had moved 300 degrees from the Aries Point, or 10 signs of 30 degrees each, with about 60 days till the first day of Northern Hemisphere spring. It is an orderly system based on real events. What the Chaldeans apparently didn’t know was that the seasons and indeed our whole calendar drifts within the backdrop of the stars. That knowledge doesn’t come till hundreds of years later.

They had a clue, and they even wrote it down for their kids. Ancient Babylonian tablet with a list of eclipses between 518 and 465, mentioning the death of king Xerxes (Photo provided by the British Museum).

At the time the Babylonian astrologer/astronomer folks were setting up the system, the two zodiacs were more or less aligned. The astrological sign Aries aligned with the constellation Aries. Then, because of a celestial cycle called precession, they gradually shifted out of alignment. Today, in fact, the two zodiacs are 23 degrees out of alignment. If you’re born during the first 23 days of Capricorn, for example, and you go to India and get a reading they will tell you that your Sun is in Sagittarius.

Note that there is a distinction between a sign and a constellation. Here is how Rob Hand, astrology’s Papa Smurf, explains it: “A sign in astrology is now and always has been exactly 1/12th of the circle, or 30 degrees of 360 degrees. A constellation consists of a visual figure, such as a ram, bull, crab, archer, etc., superimposed upon the stars by the human imaginations of many different cultures.” This is easy, right?

One issue with the constellations is that they vary greatly in size. For example, the constellation Scorpio takes up six degrees of the sky. The constellation Virgo takes up 43 degrees of the sky. None of them are 30 degrees. This created a problem for those trying to measure both time and attributes of nature; they needed some consistency.

Hence, the concept of a sign was developed and incorporated into the evenly-divided wheel of the tropical zodiac. The early Vedic astrologers had to address the same problem of these inconsistently sized constellations. They too divided the sky into 12 even 30-degree slices, but imposed those on the constellations. So, while the actual constellations vary in size, the sidereal zodiac is created by dividing the wheel into 12, just like the tropical zodiac. They just have different starting points.

A Wheel Inside a Wheel

Because the axis of the Earth wobbles, very slowly, the seasons and indeed our whole calendar drifts within the backdrop of the stars. That is to say, every 72 years, the Aries Point moves backwards against the backdrop of the stars by one degree.

Here is another view. This diagram is obviously not drawn to scale, though it illustrates nicely the way that the ecliptic (red circle) is projected onto the backdrop of the stars. The constellations are in green, behind it. The ecliptic is divided into 12, creating the tropical zodiac. The yellow line is the position of the Sun on the first day of Northern Hemisphere spring, as seen from the Earth. Its location is the Aries Point, or Sidereal Vernal Point. Illustration: Woodstock Walk for Peace website.

This is called precession, or more accurately, precession of the equinoxes. The effect is that the tropical zodiac is moving like a carousel inside the amusement park of the sidereal zodiac. It takes about 26,000 years for the carousel to go around once. This is called the precessional cycle, and it’s related to the astrological ages — for example, the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. (It’s also related to the 2012 phenomenon — that, another week.) Note, last week I made an error and said that the first day of spring comes one day earlier every 72 years, and that in 12,000 years Christmas would fall in the middle of summer. You can forget I ever said that. In actual fact, the seasons and the calendar are part of the same system that precesses one degree every 72 years.

As for the Age of Aquarius. What is this about? On the first day of spring (when the Sun reaches 1 Aries of the tropical zodiac, or the Aries Point) the Sun is also aligned with the constellation (and the sidereal sign) Pisces. It’s been that way for nearly 2,000 years — this has been the Age of Pisces. Because of precessional movement, the Aries Point is gradually — very gradually — moving retrograde from early (sidereal) Pisces toward (sidereal) Aquarius. It’s not going to get there for a while; if we use precession of the Aries Point against the sidereal zodiac as a way to measure the Age of Aquarius, there are about 600 more years of the Age of Pisces. If we use precession as the only factor, we’re clearly jumping the gun. Yet the Age of Aquarius effect may well be a real thing, however, indicated by many other factors.

So, in a sense the astronomers are right: there is a second zodiac and its existence is common knowledge. But the tropical zodiac, rather than being wrong, is time honored, and it was invented by the Babylonians. It’s a well-designed measurement system, and it works beautifully as a framework within which to tell the story of the world because it follows one of our most poignant experiences on Earth, the turning of the seasons.

But are astronomers really saying that astrology has more validity if we use the sidereal zodiac, or the constellations? Astronomers who take this view are either saying that 1) in their left-handed way, astrology has validity and/or 2) they really think that there is an archer in Sagittarius and a bull in Taurus –that’s why (they are, apparently, claiming) the constellations work better than the signs.

Working with the Two Zodiacs

Making astrology real and useful is all about interpretation. If we start with the fact that there are two zodiacs, tropical and sidereal, then we have something else we can interpret. Much of tropical Aries, for example, overlays sidereal Pisces. That’s a little like saying that if you scratch off the surface of an Aries, you will find something Piscean.

Chiron is not cast into India’s solar return chart. This is a typical Vedic horoscope, cast using the sidereal zodiac. There is a different zodiac, but there is also an entirely different approach to astrology.

Others take the view that one’s horoscope cast in the tropical system is more about the personality, and the sidereal horoscope gives a picture of a deeper level, such as the soul. Most astrology students will sooner or later cast their sidereal chart to see what is there, and it’s always interesting. The aspects and houses are familiar; most of the signs will be bumped back one.

Many people who follow astrology will eventually get a reading from a Vedic astrologer, which as mentioned uses the sidereal horoscope and ignores the tropical horoscope. The two viewpoints can offer different perspectives. Vedic astrology has completely different spiritual principles, like the firm belief in fate. It’s not a psychology exercise, like modern Western astrology is. For its part, modern Western astrology emphasizes things like choice, growth and getting to know oneself. A Vedic astrologer is a better person to ask when you will get married, how many children you’ll have and when to start a business. Predicting the time of death is not taboo like it is in modern Western astrology. Note also that Vedic astrology ignores all newly discovered planets (Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Chiron, etc.), meaning that the slowest planet it uses is Saturn. However, it applies many other cycles and concepts.

One of my first astrology clients, artist Billy Name, is fond of saying that his tropical chart was like a bright tattoo that he got when he was much younger. Later in life, he says his sidereal chart reflects more of who he’s become. He’s saying he’s outgrown his tropical chart and grown into his sidereal chart. I think this is a healthy outlook and reflects his creativity and open-minded approach to astrology, which he loves to play with. Other approaches to the theme of growth are working with transits and the progressed horoscope.

If you study astrology, you see all kinds of layering effects going on, and the tropical/sidereal theme is just one of them. Even in a basic chart, the houses and the signs overlay one another; and if you follow an older system called whole sign houses (a topic for another article) you can get a third layer. Add the sidereal signs and you get a fourth layer. A good astrologer can juggle all of this at once.

Another way to look at the tropical/sidereal issue involves how the signs influence one another. Let’s use Aries as an example, 23 degrees of which cover sidereal Pisces. The implication here is that if you’re born during the first 23 days of Aries, your Sun will be in the sidereal sign Pisces. But you don’t need to look at a sidereal chart to see this effect working.

When I delineate the properties of Aries for horoscopes and reports, I consider the influence of the 12th solar house of Aries — which is Pisces, to my mind representing a veiled aspect of Aries. I also look at Taurus, the 2nd solar house of Aries, to get a sense of the values system. In other words, I don’t just draw attributes of Aries from Aries alone; I look at the neighboring signs, since these concepts are not operating in a vacuum. I have methods of doing this for all the signs.

So whether you consider tropical Aries as overlaying a bunch of sidereal Pisces, or tropical Aries as having tropical Pisces as its 12th solar house, you have the same basic effect. Still, these things are the maps, not the adventure. They are symbols and signposts and clues and hints and ideas, and a place to let your imagination run wild.

The Thirteenth Sign?

Part two of the hoax was the addition of a “13th sign” to the mix. Apparently not understanding that the tropical zodiac is separate from the constellations, or admitting that it exists at all, astronomers informed us that there is a 13th constellation, Ophiuchus — and that therefore this means there must be a 13th sign. That does not follow logically. Even if you really dig Ophiuchus (prohounced oh-fee-you-cus), a word that means snake-handler (much like Aquarius means the Culligan man), that doesn’t make it a sign.

The constellation Ophiuchus is known in Latin as Serpentarius, which means a guy with a snake. It never quite caught on like Aquarius, the woman with a nice jug of water. The foot of the constellation touches the ecliptic. It’s near Scorpius, whose head touches the ecliptic. Image: Hevelius, ‘Firmamentum’, 1690.

Tropical or Western astrology honors all kinds of stars in the sky that are not officially part of signs. And interestingly, these fixed stars often have meanings totally different than the constellations they are part of.

As for Ophiuchus, “Owen Rachleff proposed this in 1973 in his book Sky Diamonds,” says Rob Hand, who remembers the incident. “It was not accepted by astrologers at that time and the notion faded away. Now it’s back, and younger astrologers will have to decide its fate.” Nor was Ophiuchus accepted by the ancient Babylonians, or the Vedics.

It keeps coming back. According to Jonathan Cainer, it was floated again in the late 1990s by a sci-fi author named John Sladek — a satire writer who died in 2000. Sladek liked to prank astrology, and he has a whole novel about a fictitious 13th sign based on Ophiuchus he called Arachne that was, in his novel, ‘suppressed by the scientific community’. With a wee bit of help from the Royal Astronomical Society, that bit of disinformation made newspapers worldwide.

However, when it surfaced once again last week, Ophiuchus panicked astrology fans, giving them another reason to think that the dates of the signs really had to be rearranged.

By now you get the idea — the constellations don’t determine the tropical signs. They’re related; some of them have the same names as the signs; but the zodiac we use is based on the seasons.

Now, it’s true that Ophiuchus touches the ecliptic — barely. But it has never been considered a constellation worthy of consideration under any traditional system. That doesn’t mean we can’t try it out. Of course we can experiment (as astrology has done for millennia with other fixed stars, and as we do today with things like the Galactic Center) — but it’s a good idea to remember the difference between a sign and a constellation is not splitting hairs; they are two kinds of critter entirely.

The tropical, sidereal and even Chinese systems are based on a cycle of 12, a concept which Hand says was “running around everywhere” in the ancient world. It was natural — as a creation of the human mind, which loves symmetry — that the zodiac would be simplified into a system of 12 equal parts. Twelve is not a prime number; it can be divided many ways with ease, and is the basis for the creation of aspects. For example, a square is a distance of three signs; a trine is a distance of four signs; an opposition is a distance of six signs.

Remember Your Philosophy — and Remember Nature

“The zodiac evolved when the evolution of human consciousness reached a point where there was a sense of mathematics and geometry that offered an abstract view of the universe,” said David Arner, a New York-based astrologer and one of my teachers.

Plato, speaking his mind.

“This eventually led to the whole philosophy of the Western world, which dealt with the differences between the appearances of things and the reality, and this is what Plato was grappling with. Everyone in the intellectual world had to cope with this. Coming on the 19th and 20th centuries, we kind of forgot that the cosmos seems to have these two realities. One of them is what you can see and the other is what you can conceive of.” The sidereal constellations are in the first category; the tropical signs are in the second.

“What the eye can see are a number of constellations of different sizes. What we idealize mathematically is a horoscope of 12 equal signs,” he said.

“The idea of saying that there are supposed to be 13 signs is ludicrous. That is not a number that we live in. We live in a world in our minds, and we know that there’s a symmetry that is real. So 12 is a number that reflects the symmetry and all of its parts, and 13 just doesn’t do that. It does other things, but it doesn’t do that.”

One of the things it doesn’t do is change who you are. If you identify with a snake handler, then you have something to explore — and of course, there is more to every symbol than meets the eye. Surely, being able to tame a dangerous viper is a skill that would come in handy in our current social and political environment. And, obviously, the snake represents the vital force, kundalini, and is a frequent image of sexuality. The ‘snake master’ is someone who can handle this energy. It’s an interesting image to have right next to Scorpio, the sign that represents self-mastery through the awareness of sexuality, death and transformation. These are themes for all seasons.

Yet if you’re doing Western astrology, the thing to remember is that our concept is based on cycles related to the seasons. These are are actual events both in concept and in physical reality. Rob Hand gives a beautiful image of how this looks.

“As the Earth moves about the Sun the seasons change,” Hand wrote in a recent article. “If you could speed up this motion and look at the Earth from space, you would see on the continents a movement of green (from vegetation) moving up and down. At the beginning of the Northern Hemisphere’s spring (beginning of Sun in Aries) you would see it moving up to the north of the equator, reaching its greatest development in the north at the beginning of the northern hemisphere’s summer (Sun in Cancer). Then it would begin to move south until at the beginning of the northern autumn, the southern hemisphere’s spring (Sun in Libra) it reached the most southerly part at the beginning of the southern summer (Sun in Capricorn). After that the belt of green begins to move north again. This is the “pulse of life” that the late Dane Rudhyar referred to in his book of the same name. We believe that the origin of the qualities that astrologers associate with the signs comes from this movement of life’s energy on Earth. In the last analysis, the zodiac may not be so much due to the astronomy by itself as it is to the Earth’s biosphere. The signs are simply a measure of where we are in the year and the flow of life on Earth as it relates to the heavens.”

Yours & truly,

PS: Next week we will be running monthly horoscopes for February, which will be shorter editions.

PPS: Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the inauguration of John F. Kennedy. I’ve covered his birth chart and his inaugural chart on the Planet Waves blog.

Weekly Horoscope for Friday, January 21, 2011, #847 – BY ERIC FRANCIS

Aries (March 20-April 19) — Imagine you’re a boat — a gorgeous, well-made vessel, sitting on the floor of a dry sea. There are places you’ve been, and places you want to go. But you’re stuck. Now, imagine that there is water rising, like a miracle. It’s a calm, gentle flood, soaking the dry land and turning it back into the ocean that it once was. You float up on the water effortlessly. You’re finally free. It’s an amazing feeling, your sensation of mobility and buoyancy. It’s a little like weightlessness, but there’s the solid feeling of being upright and in equilibrium. You could go anywhere, and you directly feel that potential. The sensation of any possibility being open, of any destination being available, feels so good, you don’t have to think about the future, or about the past. You don’t need a strategy. The moment calls for faith in your quest, whatever that turns out to be.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Aries, please go to this link.

Taurus (April 19-May 20) — This week you just might burst a bubble of old karma passed along by your family. There are many ways these things get passed down, depending on the school of thought or tradition you tap into for a model. Karma is real, though in our culture what often passes for the stuff are really multigenerational emotional patterns passed down over the years — in a few words, household products that can mark us for life. These include values, the well-documented influences of alcoholism and lesser-documented influences of religion, but it all amounts to the same thing: we are burdened with material from the past, and if we want to be functioning adults, we must let it go and create a new perspective. This will change how you see the world, which in turn will change your experience of the world. And thankfully the resolution can happen a lot faster than the situation itself developed.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Taurus, please go to this link.

Gemini (May 20-June 21) — The more you expand your vision, the more nervous you’re likely to become — and that’s precisely how you’ll know you’re really doing it. When you step into new territory, you might feel excitement, and you might also feel the fear of punishment or a backlash (that would be guilt) or a shaky sense of embarking on the unknown (that would be dropping an ego shell and feeling vulnerable). What I suggest you look for is the sense that you’re guided to where you’re going. That guidance might hand you a simple strategy; the strategy will have elements of traditional thought that allow you to develop what is in truth a fairly radical or innovative idea. In my view the two go together. Effective revolutionaries are almost always traditionalists. Remember that there’s something truly organic about what you’re creating.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Gemini, please go to this link.

Cancer (June 21-July 22) — Authentic exchange requires trust, and — if you follow it — that leads to daring. However, it’s important for you to get these two in order, that is, trusting first and daring later. Trust does not mean certainty. It’s a quiet confidence that feels halfway between the absence of doubt and an odd kind of assurance. When you trust, you just know — and that is despite any apparent circumstances. The thing to remember is that trust requires vulnerability; on one dimension, they are one and the same. Part of that vulnerability is openness to the feelings and experiences of the people you know. In your particular situation at the moment, there’s something about recognizing what so many people have in common with you. The struggles, desires, need for healing. Once you establish this common ground with people, or even notice it, something unusual is poised to happen, which is about community and sharing mutual purpose — a very satisfying thing for you.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Cancer, please go to this link.

Leo (July 22-Aug. 23) — This time of year always puts special emphasis on your relationships. And there is a lot to focus on now. You also have plenty to celebrate, because you’re finally getting a handle on what you want, what you need, and what concepts (I was going to say structure, or boundaries, but let’s include them under concepts) work the best for you. The beauty of the moment is that this is not in a defensive way; you’ve suddenly developed the capacity to handle passion without getting nervous, and to understand commitment as a thing that flows and changes with circumstances. You know that what you put out, you get back, not in theory but in practice. You can, over the next few weeks, look right at anyone and any feeling they might express and call it precisely what it is. Again, this is not defensive — it is factual, as evidenced by your lack of emotional attachment to what you observe. The feeling is more like, ah! That’s what that is! And this is how I want to respond.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Leo, please go to this link.

Virgo (Aug. 23-Sep. 22) — You may feel like you can tackle anything at the moment, but I strongly suggest you pace yourself. On the bright side, you have a lot of energy, idealism and some fantastic ideas for what to do, and what to do better. On the other hand, I can see that your energy bodies are processing some healing project. Part of the process is like when you get a piece of glass embedded in your skin and over the course of a few years it gradually comes to the surface. Once it does, it’s an incredibly satisfying feeling of breakthrough that can mark your whole consciousness even though the shard may only be a couple of millimeters long. And if it makes a little injury on the way out, you know that it’s the end of a process that was a long time coming. Meanwhile, over the next few weeks, beware of your ups and downs, sense your energy level as it’s becoming the next state, and respond in advance. If you feel a little tired, stop and take a nap. If you feel a little overwhelmed, take a break. If you feel like you can work for eight hours straight, work for six.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Virgo, please go to this link.

Libra (Sep. 22-Oct. 23) — I have proposed before, as have many others, that the best sex organ is the mind. The senses go there, the nerve endings start up there, the pineal gland is there, and all kinds of fun, interesting, innovative and kinky ideas percolate around. I have also proposed, as have others, that sexuality is the seat of creativity. Sex creates existence. At the moment, about 26 different aspects of this set of facts are coming to the surface. The Sun has entered the already-electrified angle of your chart where all of these experiences usually play out. And play is the word. There are deep emotions involved; you have your history to integrate and develop your ongoing relationship with; you have the adventures you seek, and you have your fears about letting yourself be free enough to go there. Keep your sense of play handy. I suggest you start in your mind, and do your best to make friends with everything that comes to the surface. In our age of paranoia, judgment and manic obsession with control, this is a radical act.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Libra, please go to this link.

Scorpio (Oct. 23-Nov. 22) — Though you’re an emotionally driven person, it’s often challenging for you to ground in your feelings. This involves the placement of Aquarius in your solar chart. In short, what this creates is a kind of mental refuge from the intensity of your emotions, and this, in turn, has a way of preventing you from feeling what you might actually be feeling — as a direct rather than conceptual experience. Now, you’re being challenged to do just that. Mars in Aquarius is compelling you to address your deepest insecurities. Don’t shy away from this. In fact, I suggest you embrace the energy as it peaks, because as you face one particular shadow, you will let it out of your psyche and it will never have quite the same power again. I also suggest you notice your resistance; that is, how inclined you are to fight yourself. Remember, that’s where the only struggle really is, and releasing that fight is the only way to make peace with yourself, and as a result, with the world.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Scorpio, please go to this link.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22-Dec. 22) — For a long time I’ve been writing so much about your creative process, you might think I had access to some hidden file that revealed your imminent acceptance to a painting academy in Paris, or that you might be working one-to-one with George Lucas. Yes, I know something about you. I know how talented you are, I know how much energy you have, and more than that, I know how necessary it is for you to express your full identity through your creative process. You are the kind of person who does not ‘make art’. You become the art you are making, and it becomes you. Now the relationship has the potential to go to the depth of full involvement. You may feel a tangible sense of your own potential. You may have a new understanding of your depth of knowledge, and new material to work with. The piece you will need to bring yourself is the focus and discipline to bring your gifts to fruition. You’ve been working at this longer than you think, and you’re further along than you currently believe. So believe in yourself and act on it.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Sagittarius, please go to this link.

Capricorn (Dec. 22-Jan. 20) — You’re safer than you think. I know that lately you feel exposed to the world, to the elements and to the wild winds of fortune. I know you feel a profound sense of responsibility, perhaps mingled with the drive to succeed that is one part ambition and three parts a matter of something you owe yourself for all your hard work. Still, you feel like there’s a television camera trained on you, and like your integrity is always on the line. That’s not exactly a safe feeling. Yet remember how safe you feel in your own home, in particular, how secure simply being yourself you feel when you’re behind your own doors. Now, imagine that you can take this sensation out into the world, wherever else you may go. Consider how wonderful it would feel to experience the world as a safe place everywhere, despite any potential for uncertainty? That sense of a fully portable safe haven is something you can bring anywhere.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Capricorn, please go to this link.

Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb. 19) — Notice every woman you meet, no matter how casual the encounter. Be alert to anything more formal than sharing an elevator for 45 seconds, and even that might prove to be noteworthy. Listen for her ideas, and pay attention to the hint that she’s connected to something beyond the obvious. Or, you could consider yourself this person: imagine what it feels like to be connected to your source in a way that lights up others when you shake their hand. Experiment with what it feels like to know your ideas are original and excellent, and to stand in the quiet confidence that brings. Respecting your own ideas and your perception of the world is one of the most basic elements of self-respect. If you hold that feeling, and acknowledge its counterpart in every person you meet, this feeling will grow like a crystal in your mind, your relationships and your circle of friends.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Aquarius, please go to this link.

Pisces (Feb. 19-March 20) — Of the many cycles in astrology is a 12-year run — what you might think of as a Jumbo Year. What a difference one of those Big Years makes. What were you doing back then, around 1999? Think about it for a moment, and if you would, consider this. In that moment 12 years ago, did you have any sense of what was about to happen? Could you have predicted where your life would go, the people you would meet, or the adventures you would embark on? You stand today in a similar moment, where a truly original life journey awaits you. This time, you can make your decisions a little more boldly, knowing from the previous cycle that you really are taken care of, that you can make good decisions and that your life works out in highly creative ways you could have hardly ever predicted. You have no need to predict, and you need no reasons to trust.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Pisces, please go to this link.

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Beneath the Guns and Politics, Gender Rage

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Dear Friend and Reader:

In the wake of the shootings in Tucson nearly one week ago, the focus of the discussion is on the political causes and implications of the incident. There are many, though what’s also clear is that there are issues below the issue, such as the deep frustration, rage and mistrust that would lead to a nationwide spike in sales of Glock 9mm pistols this week — the same kind used by suspect Jared Lee Loughner.

Vigil outside the congressional offices of Gabrielle Giffords, who was severely injured in a mass shooting Saturday morning. Photo: Chris Carlson / The Associated Press.

I understand there are legitimate uses for guns. I have a friend who lives alone in a cabin in the hills of Oregon; I’m happy she has a loaded rifle on hand. Her usual weapon of choice is lighting firecrackers to frighten off bears who come around at night to steal the apples from her tree (I’ve never personally seen this, but I would love to). Every July 4, she stocks up for the rest of the year.

However, many people who are obsessed with guns feel frustrated and powerless. For them, possessing a gun provides a sense of power. This may have narratives attached to it, ranging from fantasies of vigilante justice to thinking you could defend yourself against an intruder if necessary. There is some psychology here. The fantasy of defending oneself against an intruder requires the notion of someone against whom to defend. Until it actually manifests (which it does not, usually), that is a projection of power and aggression onto an imaginary other, which in the fantasy puts one in the position of powerlessness (without the weapon), and thus justifies the weapon. Most of these people need therapy, not target practice.

Estimates of how many American households have weapons and participate in these delusions range from a third to one-half. Meanwhile, plenty of Americans really do have fantasies of defending themselves against the rogue United States government. That is amusing.

The gun thing typically seems designed to fulfill some gaping emotional inadequacy. I speak from some experience. All of my immediate male relatives had or have handguns. In addition to being possessed by a good bit of paranoia, all are or were some combination of emotionally, creatively or sexually frustrated, which manifests as feeling deeply powerless. The gun is compensatory. Meanwhile, many of these powerless-feeling people who have firearms are just itching to use them, with little thought of the consequences. My grandfather intentionally shot himself with one of his.

Those killed in Saturday’s massacre in Tucson, from top left: Christina Taylor Green, Dorothy Morris, Judge John Roll, Gabe Zimmerman, Dorwin Stoddard and Phyllis Schneck (Photos provided by families, distributed by AP).

As the conversation around the Tucson shootings develops, there certainly seems to be a hopeless loop of projection, attack and fear. A lot of us see an opportunity for healing, and others see an opportunity to foster even more aggressive mania. At times the whole scene seems to be descending into a nightmare scenario. And there is plenty else going on in the world to raise concern — the worst flooding in Australia’s history in Brisbane, more mysterious wildlife deaths and the occasional news bulletin about the ice caps melting. Many people you would not suspect (including plenty in national politics) are believers in the End Times and/or the Apocalypse. They project their fear of individual death onto the collective; they imagine the death of the whole world.

However, there is something beneath the surface of this mess, indicated in the charts for Saturday’s shooting. What’s being proffered as a political conflict has another dimension. Let’s start with the event chart, which I will address briefly before getting into the two more illustrative charts — those of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, and her would-be assassin, Jared Lee Loughner.

Of necessity, since this is a chart interpretation, I’ll be using more astrological references than usual. I will include an astrology lesson. Try to follow along. There is a discussion area with this article in case you have questions.

Event: Arizona Shooting

Anything with a time and place can get a chart. This chart is for a single incident, but it’s also a collective event that has relevance for a whole country and in many ways, the world. The energy of this event has rippled out; the chart is relevant to the degree the event is relevant, and I would say a good bit more.

Chart for shooting in Tucson, AZ on Jan. 8. Note that the Moon in Pisces is the planet closest to the ascendant, and the bright green glyph for Pholus is the most elevated, close to the government angle or 10th house. See detail below. Together, these provide a lot of space for paranoid fantasies about government, that might be fed by many other factors. Obviously, the government is doing bad things. The question is, what do we do about it? Time source is Pima Country Sheriff’s office.

Jared Loughner arrived at the “Congress on Your Corner” meeting and opened fire at 10:10 am on Saturday, Jan. 8. The time is obtained from a sheriff’s press conference I heard, and there is not a conflicting time given anywhere (most media say “just after 10 am”).

I want to point out two things right away, made noteworthy by the planetary placements and the degrees involved. First look on the left side of the wheel.

See that crescent shaped thing that looks like the Moon? That’s the Moon. The slightly heavier horizontal line right above the Moon is the ascendant (sometimes called rising sign; the line gives its exact location within the sign). The Moon is exactly rising. Indeed it is rising to one arc minute (1/60th of a degree!) — look at those numbers. Moon is 7 degrees 6 minutes; ascendant is 7 degrees 5 minutes. The ascendant moves very fast; this conjunction is truly remarkable. The ascendant represents the primary issue of the chart, and with the Moon in Pisces, it’s emotional and spiritual. There is also the potential for all the delusion and instability that can come with a powerfully-placed Pisces Moon. The Pisces Moon rising gives the chart the feeling of a world apart; a separate sphere of fantasy.

Second. Look at the dark almost-vertical line. That’s called the meridian. Follow that right to the top of the chart, or the midheaven. There’s a bright green thing up there, which is a little planet — that’s Pholus. This is a Chiron-like body that was the second-ever discovered centaur planet. In this chart, it’s the top item — right in the beginning of the 10th house (to the left of the bold line). This is the government angle, in a chart where one theme is the government. Pholus is about things that are released without the ability to put them back, such as a release of pressure. Its key phrase is “small cause, big effect.”

Detail from midheaven of the chart for the shooting. The government angle is mobbed with planets. Pholus, mentioned elsewhere, is the bright green glyph at the top of the chart (called the midheaven). The bright pink planet is Vesta, which indicates a sacrifice. Mercury is the next one to the left, conjunct the Galactic Core and overwhelmed. Then there are three points in Capricorn — the North Node, Pluto and Pallas, which together are a dark omen for politics. Pholus in Sagittarius on the midheaven has a ‘drunk with power’ feeling. Pholus is in a conjunction with several points not shown here. They include Quaoar, which is about family patterns; Ixion, which says ‘anyone is capable of anything’; and the Great Attractor, an intergalactic point that blows up the scale of everything it touches.

We definitely had a release of pressure apparently directed toward the government in this incident, and there is no putting it back. Pholus has references to alcohol, and its placement up there is also about being drunk with power. Both Jared Loughner and the federal government, particularly Congress, can be described this way. Indeed, new members who arrive in Washington are quickly indoctrinated in a fraternity-like atmosphere of doing flaming shots of power, and this parallels the dysfunctions of alcoholism we see displayed all the time in the shenanigans of Congress.

Yet the problem indicated by the chart, with the Pisces Moon square this powerfully placed Pholus, is that as far as this event is concerned, the whole thing is dunked, steeped and fully soaked in delusion. Delusion is an inability to discern what is real from what is not. And it means that one problem can masquerade for another.

In a murder chart, one of the first things to look for is the motive. Because the 8th is the house of the cause of death, that’s where we look for the motive. The Moon is in the 1st house, so count eight houses, anticlockwise, to arrive at the 8th. The sign Libra and the planet Saturn are involved.

The 8th is about surrender, the power of ‘the other’ and it contains illustrations of and ideas about orgasm. Saturn represents a blockage. Saturn in Libra suggests the blockage comes as part of a relational issue, not merely a sexual one. This is a sexually frustrated chart. To me this represents the world-famous sexual frustrations of the American people, a country which terrorizes its children with abstinence indoctrination, telling them that if they have sex they will be like a chewed up and spit out piece of candy. In public school programs across the nation, sex is equated with immorality, disease and lack of desirability.

Dr. Wilhelm Reich, one of the most brilliant psychological and political theorists of the 20th century, suggested that mass sexual repression in a society is harvested by the political system. The bottled-up passion and frustration (generally, contained by implanted moral impulses) are converted into the feeling of mystical longing. (This is why so many desperately horny people spend so much time voraciously reading books about spirituality).

Libra is associated with Venus. Venus appears in Sagittarius — that’s a nice illustration of sexuality (Venus) converted into a mystical longing (Sagittarius). This is in the 9th house of spirituality (top of the chart, right side). But Sagittarius is also the 10th sign from the ascendant — so it counts again as the 10th house — the government. Sexual repression has become mystical longing, which has in turn converted again to an uncontainable burst of rage at the government (Pholus).

Truly, I think we need to come to terms with Dr. Reich’s idea that sexual repression is converted by the psyche into mystical longing, which is then acted out politically — usually, as he puts it, in the obsession with a charismatic leader. We tend to be proud of our sexual repression in the United States; we worship virgins and prosecute the king for having a tryst. We need to understand that our obsession with sexual purity has many consequences, both personal and political.

I recognize that Jared Loughner is mentally ill. Dr. Reich associated most psychosis with frustrated sexual energy running wild in the psyche. But if I may, here is an obvious question. Do you think he would have been more or less likely to have done this, had he been in a fulfilling sexual relationship? When you’re 22, you have a lot of sexual energy to vent. It has to go somewhere.

Natal Charts of Loughner and Giffords

To see the full natal charts of both individuals, check this link and they will open in a new window. For a glyph legend, please check this link.

One thing about this whole event is that it’s dominated by the centaur planets. This is a group of small bodies that started to appear with the discovery of Chiron in 1977. The second discovery was Pholus, in 1992 (mentioned above). The third was Nessus, discovered in 1993. The bold links take you to articles about them I wrote for Small World Stories, the 2008 annual edition. Centaurs represent an edgy kind of energy that feels vulnerable, is associated with deep emotions, experiences of wounding and healing, and psychic qualities with which most people are distinctly uncomfortable.

Here is Loughner’s Sun-Moon configuration up close. His Moon (grey crescent) is conjunct Black Moon Lilith (dark blue crescent) and the South Node (orange horseshoe), giving him the feeling that women are oppressive and unfathomable. Nessus is bright blue, conjunct the Sun. This warns of potential sexual or psychological abuse, and dark feelings toward his father. Vesta is the bright pink planet. His Mercury is at 14+ Libra, the exact degree that was rising in the chart for the Sept. 11, 2001 incident. The two events are connected by a number of factors. To see the full natal charts of both individuals, check this link and they will open in a new window. For a glyph legend, please check this link.

Let’s look at Loughner’s first — starting with a sample of the chart, the part with his Sun and Moon. Notice that he has a lot of planets and points concentrated in Virgo. Note the yellow circle with the dot — that is the Sun. Loughner has a planet closely conjunct the Sun — the light blue glyph, which represents centaur Nessus.

Perhaps the edgiest of all the centaurs, Nessus is about the cycle of karma. Stories involving Nessus come full circle. It’s all about cause and effect, boomerang style. The karma might not be instant, but it’s dependable. With Nessus there are implications of potentially inappropriate sexual contact, and often it’s an indication of sexual abuse coupled with psychological abuse. Sun-Nessus can represent a deeply wounded expressive principle, a father with some serious issues, and a compromise placed on one’s male side. When there is a centaur present like this, we have the option to turn the injury into an experience of healing and authentic power, or to act it out in toxic ways over and over again our whole lives.

Let’s consider the rest of the grouping. See the three points with the numbers 13 and 14 next to them? That is a very close conjunction. Those are (from right to left) the Black Moon Lilith, the Moon and the South Node. These all involve lunar energy; they represent how he experiences his mother, his core or child personality, and how he relates to women in general. He has dark visions of who women are; he experiences them as oppressive, dark, mysterious in a way that seems incomprehensible. Because this is on the South Node, it involves his own past life history, and speaks about his treatment of or by women, or a recent past life as a woman that is influencing him now. He is dragging this around like a large trunk full of emotional baggage, and he projects it outward as a truly sinister vision. The closer he gets to a woman, the more he will distrust her. I am sure he’s never had a close female friend. It’s very possible he’s never had sex because his distrust of women runs so deep.

Meanwhile, he is running male biology through a deeply feminine sign — Virgo. This is difficult. The Virgo presence is emphasized by the fact that he was born the day of a solar eclipse in Virgo, conjunct Nessus. He often feels female, but profoundly distrusts anything feminine. The eclipse blows this into monstrous proportions. I promise you that no matter what his family’s press release says, they understand exactly why this happened.

Sun conjunct Nessus in the chart of Gabrielle Giffords. Loughner has the same aspect in his chart. Both have them in mutable signs — their natal Sun-Nessus aspects are square one another. That creates a similar energy in both charts but a tense relationship between the people involved. To see the full natal charts of both individuals, check this link and they will open in a new window. For a glyph legend, please check this link.

Loughner has two other points worth considering, not shown in the small graphic. One is Chiron in early Cancer, indicating more injury to his feminine side, obviously unaddressed, and under constant transits lately from the cardinal cross T-square that you read about here nearly every week last year.

Last, he has Venus in Leo. He has another vision of his feminine side, and of women, that is proud, and sees itself as a queen (Venus conjunct Juno). So on the one hand he has this dark emotional-level experience of women and his own feminine side; then he aggrandizes them beyond any hope of recognition, and the Juno conjunction indicates that part of his aggrandizement is a sense that women are inherently controlling (this is a Juno factor; she and her Greek counterpart Hera were the supreme bitch of mythology).

Now here is a section of Gabrielle Giffords’ chart — the part with her Sun. It’s obviously simpler than Loughner’s, but notice what she has as well — a Sun-Nessus conjunction. Not only that, her Sun-Nessus conjunction is square Loughner’s to within a degree or two — both are in the mid-mutable signs, indicating a square. This is a relationship — any aspect is a relationship — and it’s a right angle; a tense one.

When I was a young astrology student, one of my teachers, David Arner, told me about a study done where astrologers were given anonymous pairs of charts for murderer and victim. They could not discern who was who with any consistency. With their common Sun-Nessus conjunctions, we have the first of several striking similarities between the charts of Giffords and Loughner.

Let’s look at one other. It is even more remarkable. It involves a nearly identical configuration in both charts that involves Mars, Chiron and Eris.

Section of Loughner’s natal chart with his Mars-Chiron-Eris pattern. Notice the Mars-Eris conjunction on the lower part of the chart; this is square Chiron in Cancer, above. This configuration creates some gender-based insecurities. Mars is retrograde, which suggests he has a hard time bringing out his male nature. The presence of Eris describes a feeling of competition with women, and Chiron in Cancer further describes his struggle with his mother and with trusting women (see Moon in Virgo for more information). It also makes him deeply sensitive to his environment. To see the full natal charts of both individuals, check this link and they will open in a new window. For a glyph legend, please check this link.

By way of introduction, all three of these are involved with warfare. Mars, of course, is the god of war. He represents energy, desire, passion and aggression. Chiron was a mentor to the great warrior-heroes of ancient Greece — among them Heracles and Jason. Chiron taught battlefield medicine, archery and other skills of war. Eris, the sister of Mars, was more the type to operate through subterfuge.

As an astrological factor, Chiron is about raising awareness, the healing journey, injury that focuses healing and growth, ‘shamanic’ wounding, warrior emphasis and mentorship. Chiron typically has a crisis around its placement, which will either be associated with a gathering of strength and power when it’s processed consciously, or create a spiral down effect with a descent into futility when it is ignored.

Eris is about the postmodern identity crisis — the idea that we have no idea who we are, and need three business cards to describe what we do; the ability to shapeshift or take many forms; the provocation of chaos, initiated from the inside out (inner chaos that can spread to the environment); the castaway woman; a disowned feminine side in men, and an alienated feminine side in women. Remember that when Eris was named in 2006, she upset the known order of the solar system, unseated Pluto as a planet and helped create the class of ‘dwarf planets’.

In the charts of both Loughner and Giffords, these three points are in a similar aspect in the same place in both charts.

In Loughner’s chart, to the above and to the right, Mars is conjunct Eris. It’s a slightly wide conjunction — but it’s in full effect. This is in Aries, and it feels angry, aggressive and like he cannot focus his masculine energy. Mars in Aries can lack confidence, and make up for it by doing macho things to help create the aura or sensation of masculinity. Mars is retrograde, which tends to create pent up energy and inflame the insecurity associated with a tense Mars placement. The square of Mars to Chiron can have a sense of being blocked — unless someone works to consciously integrate the square, in which case it will become a building block of integrity. Clearly this is a setup prone to outbursts of aggression.

As I mentioned before, he has Chiron in Cancer — and it’s square Mars. Mars square Chiron has two basic levels. One is that it can block the action of Mars, creating deep frustration (which will seize the emotions, via Cancer); or (if you work with rather than against it) it can represent a mighty building block in the psyche, and a foundation for true integrity. With Eris present, there will have to be a lot of integration work done to weave the sense of a fractured psyche that Eris often represents.

Mars-Chiron-Eris configuration in the chart of Gabrielle Giffords. The three are arranged in a similar pattern as in the chart of Loughner, however, the positions of Mars and Chirion are reversed. Giffords has her Mars conjunct Loughner’s Chiron, and vice versa. Chiron triggers Mars in the other’s chart. Eris is a factor suggesting a struggle with identity, which can be overcome through conscious personality integration; or can result in a psyche that is fragmented and in chaos. If that chaos persists, it can be projected outward into the environment. To see the full natal charts of both individuals, check this link and they will open in a new window. For a glyph legend, please check this link.

Now let’s look at Giffords’ chart. She has a Chiron-Eris conjunction. I covered this aspect in an earlier article called Dancing With Discord. This was active at the time of the feminist revival through the early 1970s — it’s the ‘Women’s Lib’ aspect. We have Chiron activating the energy of Eris and funneling it in a warrior-like way, with the potential for both wounding and healing. The feminism of that era did a lot of both, though it did in fact get some constructive results.

Now let’s look at how the two charts connect. Loughner has his Mars conjunct Giffords’ Chiron. Giffords has her Mars conjunct Loughner’s Chiron. So they have the same square, in the same position, only with the sign placements reversed. You could say they provoke one another’s male sides, with Giffords’ Mars in Cancer conjunct the extremely sensitive Chiron in Loughner’s chart (which stirs up his sense of being hurt by women, starting with his mother).

And Loughner’s Mars in Aries is conjunct Giffords’ Chiron. He projects his rage and hurt at her head — in Aries. He strikes her on the left side of the brain — the logic/reasoning side associated with masculine consciousness.

Eris moves so slowly that it’s in Aries in the configuration in both charts. In the life of Giffords, she is able to overcome society’s many handicaps on women and aspire to a position of authentic influence. In the life of Loughner, where it is unaddressed and unutilized, it manifests as fragmentation and chaos. Eris is a new factor in astrology — but not in our consciousness. For many years, as technology and industrialization have persisted, we have dealt with the fragmentation that Eris represents, and the need to perceive ourselves as a unified whole. Working with Eris we can assemble the pieces.

Attempting to Assassinate his Inner Woman

These aspects point to many similarities and an energetic relationship between Loughner and Giffords. They also suggest to me that Loughner was attacking a representation of his own inner woman. At the same time he lived with deep distrust and probably open hatred for women, he also envied and admired Giffords, whom he saw as a kindred spirit and representation of his own potential. In his own way, he was in love with her, and through her wanted to love the feminine in himself — though hating both.

To me this was primarily an act of gender rage, not motivated by authentic political feelings. In a sense it was rape with a bullet, but also a form of inner suicide projected outward. He turned to a gun to fill a hole left by his emotional inadequacies and sexual needs. The pressure of denying his own self became too much — he felt he had to project it outward. Much like jealousy works, when one cannot control something, or own it, one strives to kill it. Jealousy is a form of spiritual murder, and this is an extreme example.

So far as I can tell, this was not a political assassination attempt. It’s clear enough that Loughner didn’t really understand politics, but he was certainly pulled and twisted by his struggle with his own masculinity, and tormented by the mystery of his inner feminine, along with his significant emotional confusion. This inner battle left him feeling paralyzed, much like many women are paralyzed by their own inner struggle to have any sense of their power in a world that seems to keep taking it away.

Giffords for her part was doing a great job expressing her power in a male-dominated world. She managed to rise above this struggle and find her way to a place of strength and equality. She was also a beautiful (and unavailable) woman with whom Loughner was obsessed, apparently for more than three years. Her very existence made him feel insecure, and he did not avail himself of, or have available, any mode of healing that insecurity. I believe he lacked the emotional capacity to long for her companionship or sexual attention, at the same time he was enraged by their absence.

None of this is new or novel, but here we have a fairly clear example of how sexual themes, including gender, gender bias and the need to make contact with both polarities to live a sane and balanced life, can manifest in a way that is violent and projected into the political sphere. And all of this describes what is perhaps the most significant aspect of the emotional healing process on which we need to embark — our sexual nature, which needs to be acknowledged, made contact with and allowed to express itself.

The people who foster sexual repression as part of school programs know that their actions have political implications. I would imagine they were not quite expecting this.

Make no mistake — what I’m describing is a collective sexual injury that, more or less, we all possess but don’t necessarily own consciously. It will cause more problems the longer it’s left untended and dressed as a moral issue, infecting one generation after the next. And it can be a source of profound social progress if we can make some basic admissions about ourselves and commit to a healing process. Part of that involves embracing our internal opposite gender polarity and therefore embracing ourselves as a whole person.

We will all be happier, if we can do that.

Yours & truly,

Additional research: Christine Farber, Amanda Painter

Attention All Astronomers — The World is Flat

I wish I could put out a press release announcing that the world is flat, and send astronomers scrambling — to return the favor for when an astronomer sends out a press release announcing that your zodiac sign is wrong. That’s what happened this week when the following went viral faster than the dude who got rich dancing around like a dork in 34 countries:

Astronomer Parke Kunkle says that due to changes in the Earth’s alignment the dates of many zodiac signs have changed, according to NBC. In addition, there may be a 13th Zodiac sign: Ophiuchus. Kunkle says that as the Earth and Sun slowly move the signs gradually change, as expected. The change didn’t happen over night either. The 12 signs were designated to different periods of the year almost 3,000 years ago, when astrology began, and since then the Earth’s position in relation to the sun has changed.

The tropical zodiac is in the inner wheel, the sidereal zodiac is in the outer wheel. Notice how they are ‘out of alignment’ by about one whole sign — to be exact, 23 degrees. This is due to precessional movement, which shifts the two zodiacs by one degree every 70 years.

Either this is a joke or Parke Kunkle is truly ignorant of his own science. It’s probably a bit of both.

There are two zodiacs in common use. Kunkle is describing what is called the sidereal zodiac: the backdrop of the stars. It’s not the zodiac used by most Western astrologers; it’s the one used by Vedic astrologers, the kind in India, and a few in our part of the world. The two zodiacs are offset by about 23 degrees. I’ll explain why in a moment.

Here in the West, we use a zodiac that follows the seasons. It’s called the tropical zodiac. It’s based on the position of the Sun’s rays and the tropics — that’s why it’s called tropical. There is another one, based on the positions of the stars. It’s called the sidereal zodiac. If Kunkle doesn’t know this, it’s like a race car driver not understanding the concept of a tire. If so, he also doesn’t understand a long list of other concepts that must make it very difficult for him to do his work. Well, that’s what grad students are for. Notably, the sidereal zodiac is a feature in all astrology software.

In the Western or tropical zodiac, the Sun enters the tropical sign Aries the day of the vernal equinox each March. That’s the day that the Sun’s rays meet the equator directly overhead — the first day of spring in the Northern Hemisphere. (In the prior draft and in the audio I said ‘at a right angle’. Same idea.) The Sun enters the tropical sign Cancer when the Sun’s rays square the Tropic of Cancer — the first day of summer in the Northern Hemisphere, or summer solstice. The Sun enters Libra when the Sun’s rays square the equator again in September. The Sun enters Capricorn when the Sun’s rays square the Tropic of Capricorn each December, which is the first day of winter in the Northern Hemisphere (the seasons are reversed in the Southern Hemisphere).

You then take those four cardinal points and divide them equally and you have the 12 signs of the tropical horoscope. There are no ‘extra signs’ added — the tropical zodiac is a division of the 360-degree wheel of the year into 12 equal slices of 30 degrees. This is not rocket science — but it is science.

Look! It’s already there!

As mentioned, the Western zodiac begins the day of the vernal equinox. The position of the Sun that day is called the Aries Point — or the Sidereal Vernal Point. If you read Planet Waves, you read about the Aries Point nearly every week. It’s extremely sensitive. The position of the Sidereal Vernal Point or Aries Point moves gradually as the Earth wobbles on its axis. Currently, the SVP is at 5 degrees Pisces on the sidereal zodiac. Hence, the tropical sign Aries begins in the sidereal sign Pisces. And as the Earth wobbles, the SVP is moving backwards toward Aquarius — hence “the Age of Aquarius.” About 2,000 years ago, the tropical signs aligned with the sidereal signs. Now they have precessed backwards by about 23 degrees. And for that matter, so has Christmas.

We don’t adjust Christmas one day every 70 years but sure enough, eventually, Dec. 25 will fall in the middle of Northern Hemisphere summer, with no help from global warming.

So, hear ye, hear ye! Vedic astrologers use the the sidereal zodiac, and most Western astrologers use the tropical zodiac. They have different purposes, and different philosophies. Both zodiacs work. Most Western astrologers are familiar with their sidereal chart — it tells a different story, and can reveal deeper tendencies you may have noticed but not named. I’m a Pisces in tropical astrology but an Aquarius in sidereal astrology. If you’re curious, cast your sidereal chart and see where the planets show up.

As for Ophiuchus. This is an old hoax. Historically, Ophiuchus has never been listed as a constellation in the sidereal zodiac. It is a constellation out there, but it’s off the ecliptic (that is, it’s not along the path of the Sun through the sky). I’ve read that Ptolemy mentions it in his literature as an off-zodiac constellation, meaning that the Sun never travels through it. In any event, there are some two dozen constellations that touch the ecliptic; but the sidereal zodiac uses just 12 of them.

The origin of the hoax is a sci-fi author named John Sladek — a satire writer who died in 2000. Sladek liked to prank astrology, and he has a whole novel about a fictitious 13th sign based on Ophiuchus he called Arachne that was “suppressed by the scientific community.” The Ophiuchus hoax first made its rounds in the late 1990s and pops up again like those emails from the guy in Nigeria who wants you to send him your bank account number so he can transfer $15 million your way.

Weekly Horoscope for Friday, January 14, 2011, #846 – BY ERIC FRANCIS

Aries (March 20-April 19) — Your solar chart is describing some kind of career opportunity. But you may not recognize it as such. That is often the case — and people who have some of the greatest successes have their ‘first interview’ in a train station or a supermarket. The classified ad that led to my first professional journalism job was in a random page of a newspaper that someone left on a table. The particular opportunity beckoning you may feel like ‘something you would never do’, or in the alternate, something you thought you gave up and would never go back to. I suggest you not pay too much heed to these concerns and simply find out what is available. Ask questions, listen to the answers, and then proceed with confidence — even if you feel a slight aura of uncertainty. That’s just a reminder that the unknown is a place of enormous potential.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Aries, please go to this link.

Taurus (April 19-May 20) — This is a gutsy, stellar moment for you professionally, but to dial that in, you may feel like you’re going against the grain of something — the ‘right way’ of doing things, the prevailing opinion of the crowd, or your own typically reserved way of relating to the world. The one thing I suggest you remember is how much preparation you have. You are not a neophyte, though you may have the feeling of stretching your talent as far as it will go — that’s the place you want to be. That’s exactly how you stretch across the inner divide into new territory. What may be unsettling to you is the sense of your own dark emotions moving around — desire, passion, anger, need — and these may seem to blow back at you, or reverberate within you. This is what you might call a distortion of the ego, perceiving itself. Relax — how you feel in your moments of doubt is not how you’re perceived by others.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Taurus, please go to this link.

Gemini (May 20-June 21) — Some things are considered normal in relationships that detract from the passion we crave — among them keeping score, keeping tabs, and manipulation that is born of jealousy. Also you don’t have to marry every person with whom you have sex. Okay, now that we have those concerns out of the way, you are being invited into some deep erotic territory. Usually, deep means you go in with your feelings, your body and your mind. At the moment your mind is leading the way. That means curiosity, ideas, memory, fantasy — and the craving for a distinct kind of erotic surrender that is truly holistic. Indeed, I could use a stronger word to catch the real essence of the sensation, which is submission. Yes, it’s taboo. Yes, you think about this a lot. Now those thoughts are more compelling than ever. Use your head — and have the fun you want.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Gemini, please go to this link.

Cancer (June 21-July 22) — Is it possible to leave drama in relationships behind? It surely is — if both people are committed to doing so; it helps a lot if they want something else. Most drama is control dramas.. Control and love have nothing to do with one another, not in a healthy environment anyway. Most of the control drama comes from attempting to fit our relationships into forms they simply cannot take — you would never keep a kitten in a jar. You’ve known this for a while, and it looks like you’ve cleared out a small but meaningful place where you are free to be yourself in your relationships. You haven’t fully occupied that space yet, but now you’ve got some ideas. You’re being drawn into what may seem like an empty room. It’s slightly daunting and very inspiring. And it’s your own space. Put down your things, open the windows and stretch out a little.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Cancer, please go to this link.

Leo (July 22-Aug. 23) — The activity of the past few months has taken a toll on your health, though not a serious one. I suggest you make adjustments to your diet, back off on work for the weekend and perhaps visit a chiropractor. I say that because your bones are the seat of your health. I know that Leo is about the heart, and I wonder why I haven’t read in an astrology textbook that it’s essential that you pay attention to your bone structure, posture and spine as the core of your wellbeing. Now, I’m suggesting that you chill with the work routines a bit, but there are some compelling projects that are calling you back. I have an idea, which is to invest a fraction of the energy into working out the solution or calculating the next few steps in the creation process. If you do this, you may just tap into a streak of genius that is usually a bit elusive.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Leo, please go to this link.

Virgo (Aug. 23-Sep. 22) — You now can take back something that was taken from you as a child. I see you making a kind of surprise ambush on the issue, getting hold of it fast, and taking it back to your own camp. This is not your preferred method of deliberative, methodical growth; you might feel you’re doing something out of character, just as if you contemplated stealing something from a store. The thing is, this is yours; you cannot steal it. And the fact that you feel like you might be doing so is revealing. Actually if you tap into the deeper layers here you can access a whole world of emotions, possibly laced with religious views, that involve all that you had to give up for the sake of your family. As an adult you can now make careful note that it didn’t really do them any good, and remind yourself that you deserve full access to the contents of your soul.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Virgo, please go to this link.

Libra (Sep. 22-Oct. 23) — You’re at a tipping point in your relationship to technology. Part of that involves reaching a threshold of knowledge or mastery over the subject. It’s no longer a cumbersome thing that you struggle to understand; you see its use. This is allowing you to peacefully take the whole subject area on board and internalize it, in a way similar to how a musician internalizes his instrument. The other thing that’s becoming clear is your memory of a time before technology dominated relationships. You seem committed to making sure that you hold that memory dear, and do your best to keep living in a slightly old-fashioned way. That suits your nature well. And perhaps I don’t need to remind you, but when you feel safe and grounded you’re at your most adventurous and playful — and it looks like you’re feeling pretty frisky in there.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Libra, please go to this link.

Scorpio (Oct. 23-Nov. 22) — Beneath all the mental activity is a situation that pertains directly to the way that your mother’s emotions weigh on your ability to feel like you’re at home on the planet. Manipulation between mothers and daughters is a tricky subject, and few like to talk about it — but I suggest you be aware of the whole topic, because it seems destined to make itself known. You can, if you want, heal this situation, but I can tell you it’s more likely to feel like a violent outburst than it is like a trip on a healing table. The violent aspect is not literal but rather the result of a mental effect where your anger and your thoughts reverberate in your mind. Do your best to keep things on the level of emotion rather than thoughts. If you’re thinking in circles, go deeper and feel — you’ll set yourself free and make contact with the way you’ve felt confined in the past. And that, simply, is the compulsion to push your feelings up to your mind. You’re now putting them back where they belong.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Scorpio, please go to this link.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22-Dec. 22) — There’s an idea floating around that ‘spirituality’ is about love and light, and that things like fear, rage, grief and other forms of shadow material are somehow inappropriate. Of course, in other quarters, life is dominated by these dark emotions and it’s understandable why someone seeking peace of mind might think it’s a good idea to avoid them. However, light and dark ideas and emotions both call for awareness. I don’t mean, as some suggest, that the two need to be ‘balanced out’. And I’m not suggesting we need to do one gesture of evil for every creative gesture. I mean that in your inner world there is an incredible diversity of emotion and sensation, and that in order to draw the full power of your creativity — clearly, your most important goal — you need to contact all of your feelings, or rather, you need unfettered access. Therefore, I suggest you be repelled by no part of who you are, no thought, no idea, however strange. Being real with yourself is the first and most significant step to authentic honesty, and that is the heart and soul of art.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Sagittarius, please go to this link.

Capricorn (Dec. 22-Jan. 20) — That edgy feeling may come and go for the next week or so. I suggest you ride it out consciously each time, and see what you learn as you walk along the inner precipice of your mind. There are really two things going on. One is that your psyche is processing out old tendencies and patterns that you don’t need any more. As you notice these patterns they may frustrate you; give them up on the spot, and choose something else. The other thing happening is that you’re pushing into entirely new psychic territory, which may feel at once enticing, uncomfortable and adventurous. Any time you sense the unknown or unfamiliar within yourself, reach in that direction. Do your best to translate it into words, even if they feel imprecise. You will get much closer to the point than you think — and leave yourself a trail back to the places within yourself you’ve visited.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Capricorn, please go to this link.

Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb. 19) — With Mars entering your sign this weekend, you’re likely to feel like it’s time to be on your own and do your very own thing. You’ve spent a lot of time inquiring, pondering, inwardly seeking and healing; this is a precious moment of reaching for independence, and grasping it firmly. Just make sure you don’t push at the same time you reach. You may feel a fairly potent urge to bust out. Your mind may be sending the message that you’ve waited too long and suddenly it’s now or never. Actually, it’s just Mars, which is giving you some of that impulse power to which you don’t normally have access. It’s Mars, reminding you what you want the most. Many people will wait patiently for this kind of sensation to pass, hoping it will go away. I suggest you act on it, gently and persistently, but promptly enough that it matters.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Aquarius, please go to this link.

Pisces (Feb. 19-March 20) — You don’t need to put up with jealousy, neither in yourself nor in others. By that I mean it’s not necessary. Instead, I suggest you proceed directly to understanding and addressing the insecurity that jealousy conceals, and factor this into your understanding of the human condition. Make feeling good about yourself your primary life goal, and take constructive action based on that idea. Do what supports your goals and what you love; reach for your deeper resources. If you do this, you’re likely to encounter people who follow accordingly. There is nothing in your chart to suggest that you need to be striving for conventional relationships. Rather, where others are concerned, the bold emphasis is on community and egalitarian friendship. Do it now, do it in a big way and remember — you’re always your own person.

To pre-order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Pisces, please go to this link.

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