The new year began, astrologically, with the New Moon of December 27th. Astrologers had been watching its approach with bated breath. Like its parallel transit exactly a year ago, when Benazir Bhutto was killed in Pakistan, we knew this latest Pluto-Mars duet would stimulate a vision of civilization breaking down. It was widely expected that somewhere in the world something would happen to epitomize the convulsions our globe is experiencing right now.… click here to continue reading.
Archive | 2008
Dec 2008
Service or Slavery
Value and worth
For those sky-watchers tracking the trajectory of the world economy as it careens giddily under the influence of Saturn and Uranus, the next chapter in the drama will arrive with Pluto’s opposition to America’s Venus and Jupiter (Sibley chart).
Coming to a head in March and April for the first of several peaks, this opposition suggests a radical shift downwards in the value of – of what?
Joy is great, isn’t it?
My neighborhood went nuts last night. A street party spontaneously combusted as the reports came in of Obama’s win. Whoops, whistles, howls of joy. And pots and pans! Love it when people bang on pots and pans. On New Year’s Eve it happens too, but this was way better. Congo drums in the streets of Harlem. In Chicago’s Grant Park: joy on faces not used to exuding joy.
This was my favorite layer of meaning to what happened Nov 4th, 2008, as Uranus and Saturn opposed in the sky.… click here to continue reading.
Nov 2008
The Lightning-Struck Tower
Picture lightning striking a sturdy old clock tower.
The cataclysmic Saturn-Uranus opposition gave us the perfect modern symbol of this ancient tarot card image, when the most reputable banks in the world (Saturn) collapsed (Uranus) like a house of cards at the Full Moon in September.
Americans were shocked – shocked! – to find that all those smart men1 at the highest echelons of the nation’s financial industry had been investing in junk mortgages.
Oliver Stone's "W", which I haven't seen
Oliver Stone’s “W.” is surely the first of its genre: a mockumentary-while-the-guy’s-still-in-office. But I don’t want to see this war criminal Hollywood-ized.
It isn’t merely that the content is too awful for portrayal — after all, one can stand to see all sorts of distressing things made into movies if the approach is respectful and informed (e.g. the ubiquitous nazi-era films like Claude Miller’s “Un Secret“). What feels twisted is the idea of this moral pygmy of a man, the agent of so much global suffering, being stylized with popular-entertainment tropes.… click here to continue reading.
October 2008
The Bubble Bursts
At this writing, the gargantuan Wall Street “bail-out” has proven itself to be anything but the panacea its proponents claimed. Washington’s attempt to cut interest rates in tandem with international central banks has been revealed as too little too late. Whether the US government’s partial nationalization plan will do anything to slow the downward spiral remains unclear, while the prospect of putting bank ownerships into the hands of a government as corrupt as this one are ominous indeed.… click here to continue reading.
September 2008
The Big Shake-Up
“’My country, right or wrong’ is a thing that no true patriot would think of saying… It is like saying ‘My mother, drunk or sober.’”
– G. K. Chesterton
This month the Saturn-Uranus opposition officially goes into orb. After the Equinox (9/22 8:46 am PDT) the transit’s impact on humanity will become stronger and stronger, and its worldly parallels more and more obvious. So will its impact on the metabolic, mental and emotional bodies of individuals.
August 2008
Empowered or Devoured
Dr Strangelove
To conscientious Americans it is nothing short of unbelievable; to international observers it is beyond insanity. The group of militarists who brought us the War in Iraq are actually getting ready to attack Iran. Apparently willing and eager to follow up the most notorious military blunder since Viet Nam with another whose outcome promises to be downright dystopic, Washington has put the bulwark in place in the Eastern bloc to launch the assault.
The Cardinal Cross Years
Published in The Mountain Astrologer June/July 2008 as “Astrology in Troubled Times”
Astrology as Spiritual Constant
Troubled times have always been astrology’s stock in trade. From the lunar calendars of Ice Age shamans1 to the glossy magazine horoscopes at the grocery store, in one form or another people have looked to the sky to explain their distresses, large and small. Throughout human history astrology has provided a spiritual constant.But let us take a moment to qualify the term spiritual, for it is a peculiarity of the times we live in that the word has taken on a newly controversial buzz.… click here to continue reading.
July 2008
Starved and Stuffed
Saturn Direct
This month Saturn is direct again, climbing up through the early degrees of Virgo. Readers whose natal charts contain a planet in this degree range will feel a pinch they may remember quite well — from last October, and then again in February — when Saturn was in this same place. But you aren’t in the same place, are you?
The function of retrogradation is to repeat the cosmic lesson in question.