Dear Planet Waves Reader:

Friday, as a letter was going out to you suggesting that Saturn square Neptune need not be interpreted as negative, a series of terrorist attacks was happening in Paris. I’ve begun working on those charts and will have more for you in Tuesday’s edition of Planet Waves FM.

It would seem that Eris was more the keynote of these events, an archetype associated with covert activities leading to war, and personally, a sense of self that is destabilized and fragmented. And, notably, seeking wholeness.

But we can’t ignore the Saturn-Neptune pattern, given how it describes the kind of religious delusions that we’re seeing attributed to those accused of these murders. On one level it does not matter who the real perpetrators were; what matters is that the events are being blamed on a holy war, or jihad — and that jihad is real.

It’s also been going on for a long time; it was clear what was happening in the summer of 1990 (Operation Desert Shield, then Iraq War I in January 1991).

With Saturn square Neptune we have two issues: one is a kind of drug abuse connected to religious excuses. The other is that religious concepts are going to have a hard time standing up, and those who cling to them may be doing some thrashing about. When religious concepts are removed or threatened, that can reveal the lack of solid ground that our minds want to rest on.

The whole struggle with religion is really a struggle with authority. I can personally testify that something akin to what we think of as God exists, but it’s not in any form you’ve ever seen painted in a museum, with a beard and all. (The closest we’ve got in the form of visual art involves abstract studies in light.)

The authority issue has two stages in 2016 — Saturn square Neptune, when extreme doubts about patriarchy and indeed matriarchy set in; and Saturn square Chiron, which will be, I think, a more honest confrontation with the authority issue. In order to actually address the authority issue, we must address religion, parents and money — they are all approximately the same thing.

I’ll have more to say about this in a series of audios I’m about to begin, describing the astrology of 2016-2017, as part of the Vision Quest project of Planet Waves.

And I’ll catch you Tuesday evening with an inquiry into the Paris charts, including that of France itself.

Thanks for tuning in, and have a peaceful evening.

w/love