November 4, 2003

• Big News in the Sky

  
  

  People who know me know that I’m interested in some things that are commonly considered not to go together, such as astronomy and astrology.  For some reason that thought just reminded me of the time at a Mensa get-together when one of my snobbish fellow-Mensans said, upon finding out I’m a professional psychic, “I always thought that high IQ and psychic abilities were inversely proportional.”  As for me, not having ever seen any statistics on such things, I’ve always thought that excellent brain function in one area might suggest excellent brain function in other areas… but I digress.

  
  

  

  
  

  I got this nifty Lunar Eclipse animation from NASA.  The newsy little emails I get from them and from www.SpaceWeather.com point me toward some of the most interesting things I find on the web.  There are very few sources of astrological info of such high quality as those astronomical and geophysical sites.  The number of lunatics and imbeciles spreading specious and/or spurious info on astrological topics, and the notoriously fuzzy logic of many astrological adherents, are sufficient to account, in my opinion, for the fact that this ancient science is so widely discredited among modern scientists.  (…or should I say post-modern?  “Modern” has such an old, passé, connotation now.)

  
  

  In my youth I, too, “didn’t believe in” astrology, and still don’t, really.  I’ve simply had enough experience of it and of the ways in which the detailed natal charts of everyone whose charts I’ve examined reflect the lives and personalities of the subjects, and the way big stellar events reflect big global/societal events.  Two of the last that come to mind immediately are the fall of the Berlin Wall  in 1989 when Saturn, Uranus and Neptune were together in Capricorn, and the anti-war fervor when Jupiter, Uranus and Pluto were together in Virgo in 1969.  At this point in my life, I simply accept the validity of some parts of astrological lore while open-mindedly reserving judgement on the parts that have not yet been proven to my satisfaction..

  
  

  Astronomers and astrologers alike know that every lunar eclipse occurs at a full moon, but not every full moon is an eclipse.  For both groups full moons and lunar eclipses are noteworthy events.  The eclipses seem to have more significance to both groups also.  The full moon eclipse coming up this weekend is an especially big one for astrologers, for reasons that probably don’t mean much to very many astronomers.  For reasons I will briefly go into shortly, it didn’t mean much to me when I first heard about it, but now that I’ve taken a closer look, it’s wowing me, too.

  
  

  Hints of the upcoming astrological hoohaw have been flying around for months.  Rich Humbert, one of my favorite astrologers, mentioned November’s full moon eclipse ‘way back in the summer sometime, without giving any details.  Then, last month my daughter forwarded something to me about the so-called Harmonic Concordance.  The tone of that bit of fluff was so hysterical and its semantics so shaky that my initial impulse was to disregard it.  And so I did.  (Yeah, I’m an effete intellectual snob, and a semantic purist…wanna make sump’m’ uv it?)  I certainly never made the connection between that and Rich’s long-range Celestial Weather Report on the full moon eclipse.  Then more recently Kabuki posted a link to this chart that put it all into perspective for me.

  
  

  Let’s just disregard that “Concordance” shit.  That’s some blithering idiot’s idea for drawing parallels between this event and the (much ballyhooed and highly disappointing to many) Harmonic Convergence of the 1980s.  The much-forwarded aforementioned email, which reached me by several channels other than Angie, also mentioned some planetary connections and used (MISUSED) the word “conjunction” in conjunction with them.  Anyone who speaks astrologese knows what’s wrong with that usage.  For those who don’t, it’s this:  a conjunction in astrology is two or more planets, points, or lights near enough to (within “orb” of, in astrologese) the same degree of the zodiac.  They’re not really near each other–astrologers aren’t stupid, we know about orbits, parallax and such–they just appear in Terrestrial skies to be near the same point on the Celestial Equator.

  
  

  A better (semantically better than “concordance”) choice of word might have been “concord” since a concordance is something like an index to the words in a text (except for a fairly obsolete usage synonymous with “concord” or agreement), but where’s the NewAgey whoopdedoo coattails in that, eh?  The preferable jargon when speaking of the planets’ angular relationships to each other would have been “sextile”.  Now that is close enough to “sex” to have its own bit of sexiness, I think.  Actually, that “sex-” is the sex of SIX, sixty degrees, one sixth of a circle.  We have coming up, in addition to the Sun/Moon opposition in Scorpio/Taurus, a Mars/Jupiter opposition in Pisces/Virgo and a Chiron/Saturn opposition in Capricorn/Cancer.  [If "Chiron" doesn't sound anything like any planet you ever heard of, Google it, guys, and get educated.  Its long cometary orbit extends from inside that of Saturn to outside that of Uranus!]

  
  

  There are some other aspects in that chart that stood out to my eyes, such as Neptune in Aquarius squaring Sun and Moon, which the Hysterical Harmonicats have ignored.  The Moon’s Nodal Axis (Caput and Cauda Draconis:  Dragon’s Head and Tail, denoting Karma and Dharma) is prominently connected there too, and that pulls Mercury into the mix.  Pluto is square Jupiter, too, but none of the gushingly enthusiastic “Light Workers” promulgating this hoopla seems to want to look at any of this.  They’d rather focus on the sexy stuff.

  
  

  Those three oppositions in water and earth signs make up two Grand Trines, one in [drumroll please] water, and one in earth [ta-daa].  Hold on, I’m getting to the sexy part:   those three oppositions and two Grand Trines in turn make up six sextiles.  And here is where the whoopdedoo begins to get thin for some of us.  The orb of separation of a couple of them is a wee bit distant, but that’s a purist’s quibble.  Anyhow, after I got a look at that chart I was ready to abandon my skepticism (but not the semantic quibble–I’m hanging onto that on principle) because this Grand Sextile or Star of David or Double Grand Trine, or whatever you want to call it, has some striking connections to my very own personal curse/blessing pattern.

  
  

  For those not-intimately-enough acquainted with me to know:  because of the placement of most of my natal planets, the tenth and twenty-fifth degrees (and the orbs of aspect surrounding them) of every sign of the zodiac are important to me.  In this case, since we give the “lights” (Sun and Moon) a larger orb than the planets and points, that pair, at 16+° of their respective signs, impacts my aforementioned CBP.  Likewise, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Chiron are all close enough to either the tenth or twenty-fifth degree of their signs to be considered.  Just so Pluto won’t feel left out, it’s in my twelfth house, only seven degrees away from my Ascendant, close enough, some say, to be considered conjunct.

  
  

  What all of this means to YOU, I cannot say.  I will say that it might behoove anyone with an interest in knowing what’s around the next bend in the road to make some comparisons between the Grand Sextile chart and his or her own natal chart.  What it all means to me I can sum up in one word:  intensity.  Gotta love it.

  
  

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  • 8:05 pm
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