Mark Zuckerberg was in the news a few weeks ago, on the day Pluto (plutocracy) stationed during its narrowing square to Uranus (technology). Facebook’s acquisition of a smart phone app for a billion dollars had the business page so excited it could hardly contain itself.

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.