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.

I don’t have to tell you, dear reader, that there’s nothing like astrology for knowing which way the wind is blowing. Not just in our own individual life, but knowing the meaning of the storms we’re all being buffeted by together right now, during this thrilling, surreal, crazy-making epoch.

It always struck me as so quintessentially American, that Pottery Barn metaphor that Colin Powell and Thomas Friedman chose to refer to  Iraq: “You break it, you own it”. I wonder whether a public speaker  elsewhere in the world would have made this same point by invoking a less explicitly commercial image. Such as, say, a mother saying to her child,

Here it is, the Murravian Mantra: Only by living through our charts can we understand the world, and our place in it.

From now until 2025, the world will be treading the waters of Neptune-in-Pisces. On April 4th Neptune glided into the sign of the oceans, where Chiron had been waiting for it. That very week, Japan dumped 15,000 gallons of radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean. Recall that a year ago last April, BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig blew up in the Gulf on the very day of Chiron’s last entry into Pisces. Thus has the theme of wounded waters announced itself as a key teaching of the Cardinal Cross period.

It happened on the very day Uranus (shocks, shattering) moved into Aries. On March 11th, the tectonic plates under the Pacific Ocean buckled and northeastern Japan was devastated by the biggest quake-tsunami in its recorded history. At this writing the peril of nuclear reactor meltdown looms as the most far-reaching of the quake’s attendant dangers.

For at least part of the month of March, six planets will be in Pisces; the sign of confusion or bliss, depending on how we approach it. We’ll have the choice to either float on top of the chaos or drown in it. It all depends on how well we understand this most elusive of signs. Pisces is said to govern illusion; but it also promises to steer us through illusion, all the way to the other side...