Dear Friend and Reader: Mercury stations retrograde on Wednesday. This is a little like turning up the volume on our mental environment. Poster by Kevin Paulsen. Photo by Eric Francis. And that environment has been overwhelming lately. Monday’s news that plutonium is leaking from one of the crippled nuclear reactors at the Fukushima nuclear plant […]
The astrology of April stars yet another rare event — the opposition of the two largest planets, Jupiter and Saturn. This has been developing for a while and it’s in full effect right now, but an event in about a week lights up the aspect. Think of this as being like one of those huge barbells you used to see in cartoons, with enormous round weights on either end.
Through most of April the emphasis of the planets shifts to Aries. The Sun will be in the hottest of the fire signs through April 20, joining Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Uranus and Eris. That is a lot of Aries, appropriate enough for springtime here in the Northern Hemisphere — full of passion and impulse. This is going to require some adult tempering.
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.
Once someone explained to me that the distinction between jazz and blues had more to do with sorting things out in the record store than it did with meaningful differences in the music. To hear the terms, one would get the mistaken idea that they are entirely unrelated things. In fact, they are entirely related, most notably by being music.
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.
We’re now in the last days of the astrological year — the time before the vernal equinox. The Sun is moving through the final degrees of Pisces and thus wrapping up the cycle of the zodiac. In astrology (and astronomy) there is a time-measuring device rarely mentioned to the public, called sidereal time. This is a way of dividing the year into a scale that is based on 24 hours. The vernal equinox is midnight in this symbolic representation; that is the beginning.
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.
