As April begins, Mars is completing one of its relatively rare forays into retrogradation.Since Jan. 23the red planet has been climbing back down through the sign of Virgo.

The influence of Pisces is all-encompassing right now. People with a lot of water in their charts will be responding to it especially strongly, but every one of us is submerged in it.

It is a once-in-168-year event. In a year chockfull of world-altering transits, it is one of the most important. The god of the sea is inaugurating a thirteen-year-long shift in the way we look at water.

Now begins a calendar year that’s been well worked over before it was born. Variously interpreted eschatological imagery and dubious pop culture prophecies have been pouring forth for years now, exploiting poor 2012 like an MGM child star. Now that it’s here, let’s separate the hype from the essential meanings that underlie it.

This Solstice season, bells are tolling for the death of the Old Paradigm. You can hear them all over the globe. The shifts they signal are too profound to stay local, or national. The changes upon us right now are not confined to either the First World or the Third World; the Northern of the Southern hemisphere; the 99% or the 1%.

Get your yellow highlighter out. It’s time to mark your calendar; the Full Moon this month is a stand-out. First off, it peaks on the eve of eleven-eleven-eleven. Eleven is considered a master number in numerological tradition. Even just one eleven is enough to raise the eyebrows of those who assign to numbers a numinous significance. As the lunar cycle peaks, we will get the power of eleven iterated by three, itself considered a perfect number by the ancients.

To get a bead on the energies of this month, let’s first consider its place in the solar cycle. A time of Dark Mysteries, Scorpio has a strong seasonal character. It is governed by the planet Pluto, governor of taboos and secrets. Not only the Sun, but Venus and Mercury ingress into Scorpio in October. This will make for a potent Halloween (or Samhain [pronounced SOW-en] in Wicca): our annual celebration of the human desire to know forbidden things.

The Sun’s in Virgo and the Moon’s in Pisces at the Full Moon on September 12th. Both are misunderstood signs, so this lunation can be hard to deal with. We all have to cope with the blind spots of our cultural conditioning. It isn’t that Pisces and Virgo are inherently any more difficult an opposition than any other zodiacal pair; it’s that our society doesn’t value the impulses they represent.