The Neighborhood Is Changing

After Pluto was discovered in 1930, astronomers and astrologers would often talk about one more Planet X yet to be found. There were even some astrologers who hypothesized Transpluto, and started using it’s theorized positions in charts. But neither the astronomers nor astrologers ever expected the multitude of new bodies that would be discovered in the neighborhood of Pluto and beyond.

When Uranus was discovered in 1781, it shattered our preconceptions and added a whole new dimension to astrology. Sixty-five years later, the discovery of Neptune showed us our universe was much larger than we had dared imagine. In 1930, Pluto exploded into our consciousness with an intensity that made the previous discoveries seem almost pale by comparison. Each of these pushed the borders of our solar system further outward, and at the same time there was a corresponding delving deeper and deeper into our inner psyche.

But we thought we knew the area within the borders quite well.  That is, until 1977, when Charles Kowal stunned the world by finding a possible planet orbiting between Saturn and Uranus!  We didn’t really know the immediate neighborhood at all!  And a few years later, in 1992, the discoveries of the first body out past Pluto (nicknamed QB1), and another body in between Saturn and Uranus (named after another Centaur, Pholus) marked the beginning of a whole new wave of discoveries, one that is still going on.  During the past 20 years, so many new bodies have been discovered that the mind boggles.

Our ancestors, the astrologer/astronomer/priests, only had to make sense charting the motions of the Sun, Moon, five planets, and the Moon’s Nodes.  Most of what we know of today as astrology is based on the findings of those early skywatchers.  We adapted somewhat in 1781, and the Uranian shockwaves are still being felt.  We adapted again after Neptune’s discovery but while some things became more clear, others became much more fuzzy.  We are still trying to adapt to all that Pluto has brought to us, and it has been quite often a very painful experience.  But in each case, humanity and its astrologers have had several decades to begin comprehending the new perceptions of how our world fits in the largest universe.

Chiron’s coming into our consciousness changed the dynamics, forcing us to take second and third looks right here in our immediate neighborhood.   Those who were brought up to read the Christian New Testament are probably familiar with Luke 6:42, which advises us, before we can help another person, we must first the splinter from our own eye.  You can interpret this on many levels, but it’s very much Chiron, which is telling us that in order to truly step outside of our own limits and be of use to the rest of the universe we must first work on our own selves, our own immediate issues.   And, thick and fast, more and more Centaurs have been showing up, showing us our own darkest sides….the areas of ourselves we really need to work on.  Just as they are being discovered in our own backyard, relatively speaking, in parts of the solar system we thought we knew well, we are having to look at parts of ourselves for the darkness we once tried to assume was always in ‘the other person’….and acknowledge that, no, it’s in all of us too.

The Neighborhood is Changing.   It can be terrifying.  But just as in art, the empty spaces help define the artist’s work, the darkness helps to show us what is truly good about us as well. 

In the new neighborhood, we are all human, all wounded….but all have the potential to help each other help ourselves heal.

—————

Say hello to some of your new neighbors.  These are all the Centaurs that have been named so far:  Chiron, Pholus, Nessus, Asbolus, Hylonome, Chariklo, Pelion, Okyrhoe, Cyllarus, Elatus, Echeclus, Bienor, Thereus, Amycus, Crantor

 

 

Invading Wall Street

Although Occupy Wall Street had been planned for weeks before, it was on the afternoon of September 17, 2011 that the invasion took place that was the beginning of something that has become a worldwide movement. There are many astrological ‘events’ that presaged this revolutionary event, and perhaps one of the most talked about has been the square from revolutionary Uranus (who often seems to resemble Prometheus, the being that smacked the major gods in the face by stealing fire from Olympus and giving it to the common people, thus putting power in their hands) in the new-beginnings sign Aries to transformational Pluto in the big-business/big-government sign of Capricorn.

But there are other signatures of this event that you might miss if you only look at the regular planets.   Enter the Centaurs.

When Occupy Wall Street officially began, there was an exact conjunction between the Centaurs Pholus and Hylonome at 14 Sagittarius 09.   According to Dane Rudhyar, the Sabian Symbol for this degree is “Ground Hog, out of its winter sleep, looks for its shadow.”   If you are familiar with the tradition, the ground hog looks for his shadow to decide if the cold of winter is about to end, or if it will still be bitter and miserable for many weeks.  One can imagine the protestors, the “99%”, finally emerging from their cave to look for a way to get the “1 %” to provide a more humane financial future for them.   (The Centaur Pholus, himself, lived in a cave.)   Some interesting key phrases have been surfacing for these two bodies.  For Pholus some keys include invasion, communion of two worlds, clash of cultures, dispossessed, homeless, dissolving structures, the catalyst and provider for a landslide-like change from which there is no return to the previous state.  And Hylonome includes such key phrases as the cry of the poor, the ability to evoke sympathy, an increase in the emotional gradient of a situation, helplessness, a yearning for the impossible.    One can see elements of both in this growing movement.

And Mercury, by the way, was 14 Virgo 58, just separating from the square to these Centaurs.

Pholus and Hylonome might have been in exact conjunction on the day the occupation began, but they were keeping pace with each other for quite some time.  In February 2011, they moved within a half a degree of each other (and will be until December of this year.)  It was in February that there were a series of protests in Wisconsin, sometimes with as many as 100,000 protestors, opposing a government bill aimed at handling a $3.6 billion budget deficit which many saw as severely penalizing all but the wealthiest residents of that state.

And in June 2011, when a Canadian anti-consumerist magazine called Adbusters registered the domain name occupywallstreet.org, the two bodies were only 15 minutes apart.

One more pair of Centaurs is quite active in this movement, and these two have a special relationship mythologically as well.  In the chart for Occupy Wall Street, Chiron at 1 Pisces 58 R was square Chariklo at 1 Sagittarius 13 (reaching exact square 8 days later as protestors were starting to be arrested, and videos started appearing outraging many that showed women getting maced by police.)

Mythologically, these two were husband and wife.  A lot has been written about Chiron.  He is quite frequently active when we are forced to look at deep wounds we have tried to bury or cover over, and are  forced to take a close look at the cause (and perpetrators) of the wounds in order to find a way to bring about healing.   Chariklo’s influence stirs people to question reality so that they begin to see that what has been limiting them is only apparent reality and therefore they have options they hadn’t considered….it leads people to choose to open a door in spite of possible consequences.

They can travel for years without making any noticeable aspect, and at other times make a specific aspect such as a square over and over, sometimes covering whole decades.  Why?  Because the length of their orbits is so similar they can sometimes be travelling at the same rate of speed for long, long stretches of time.    (They had squared each other 3 times in 1998, but prior to that the last time they were in square was in 1896.)

The occupation occurred during a period when they had been moving in and out of square for months, the first one occurring in the Autumn of 2009 around the time of the G-20 Summit of world heads of state (held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) which was set up to discuss the world’s financial crisis.   The city turned down, time and again, permits for groups wanting to assemble for a peaceful protest, until finally the ACLU sued the city and forced them to allow the demonstrations.   It began with small protests, but eventually there were rallies with between 5000 and 8000 participants.  One of the speakers declared,  “We’re rallying here just a few miles from where the corporate robber barons have settled down to divide up the planet, that group of bankers, financiers and political leaders who have wreaked havoc upon our world,”  urging listeners to “fight for another world, put people before profits.”

There will be two more of these squares in this series, one in June and the other in August 2012.  I suspect that this Occupy Wall Street movement will continue its momentum until at least then.   And there may be some really major events in those months, as Chiron goes stationary in June closely square Chariklo, while Chariklo stations two months later again closely square Chiron.

One more thing.   There is an asteroid named Hidalgo that stirs people to demand respect and to stand strong and firm for their principles.  When Occupy Wall Street began, Hidalgo was at 1 Sagittarius 29, closely conjunct Chariklo.

Salacia and Uranus

On Sept 22, 2004, a body was found out past Pluto that was eventually named Salacia.  Maybe the  fact that it was in Pisces when it was discovered, ruled by Neptune, is only coincidentally related to the choice of names, but Salacia was the the mythological being that the Greek god Neptune fell totally in love with and eventually married.  (She at first was so overwhelmed by his presence that she swam away when he approached, but was eventually persuaded to give her consent to the wedding.)   She is written of variously as the goddess of the sea, goddess of salt water, and goddess of mineral springs.

The planet Uranus has a reputation for shaking things up, even breaking things up.  In 2007, Salacia and Uranus began to move near each other, and on March 15, 2008, they were exactly conjunct at 19 Pisces 02.   Ten days later, when they had only separated by 17′, a 156 square mile chunk of the Wilkins Ice Shelf disintegrated.  This huge shelf, 5400 square miles of ice, is located in Antarctica.   Sciences start looking more closely at the area, and were surprised to discover the the whole shelf was beginning to break  away from the continent, and they watched as, at the end of May, another 62 square miles broke off.    By the end of November it was announced that in 2008 alone, the shelf had lost 770 square miles, and in January 2009 that the shelf was only held up by a very thin strip of ice that.  If that strip were to break, and the entire shelf (about the size of Jamaica) were to break away, it would be the largest such breakup of artic ice so far, and would result and numerous icebergs with their potential danger to shipping, and the melting giving further rise to the water levels.  All during this period, Uranus and Salacia moved in and out of orb of conjunction.

Salacia first moved into Pisces in 1993.   That was the year that Professor David Vaughan, a scientist working with the British Antarctic Survey,  predicted that the northern part of the Wilkins ice shelf was likely to be lost within 30 years if climate warming on the Peninsula were to continue at the same rate.  In 2008 David conceded that his predictions were too conservative, as changes were occurring much more quickly than he had ever imagined.

Interestingly, an article was published in the journal Science, on August 8, 1975, entitled, “Are we on the brink of a pronounced global warming?”.  This is probably the first use of that term in its modern sense.  Salacia was about 5 Aquarius 30, which would make her semi-square to her position later when the scientific community’s attention was drawn to the breaking up of the above ice shelf.

“Timothy Leary’s dead….oh, no he’s outside, looking in”

One of the members of the yahoo group, chaos-stars, was kind enough to bring an article to my attention that relates very much to Chiron’s pending entry into Pisces. I’ll post the link to the whole article by Alexander Zaitchik at the bottom of this blog…you may find it as interesting a read as I did. But I’d like to reprint the first, and last two, paragraphs here:

“April 10, 2010: Next week, the brightest lights of the psychedelic cognoscenti will gather in San Jose, California. Leaving swirls of tracer visions in their wakes, they will converge from around the world at an incongruously bland Holiday Inn, 50 miles south of the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood that once served as the pulsing capital of Psychedelistan. There, several hundred turned-on and tuned-in doctors, psychologists, artists and laypeople will participate in the annual conference of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). For four days, they will explore — through workshops and lectures, nothing more — the widening gamut of clinical inquiry into the uses of the psychedelic experience, a global resurgence of which has led to hopeful talk of a “psychedelic revival.”"

“”If we continue using the old strategies that have caused the current global crisis and which are in their consequences destructive and self-destructive,” Grof recently wrote, “it might lead to annihilation of modern civilization and possibly even the human species. However, if a sufficient number of people undergo a process of inner psychospiritual transformation and attain a higher level of awareness, we might in the future reach a situation when we will deserve the name, which we have so proudly given to our species: Homo sapiens.”

“This, in a nutshell, is the same cosmically ambitious hope expressed by the psychedelic pioneers of a half-century ago. Most of those men and women have long since given up the dream, moved on to other things, or died. Stanislav Grof is among the very few still here. Judging by the hopeful tone of next week’s MAPS conference, the world of medicine may finally be ready to catch back up with him.”

The phrase “a half century ago” nearly knocked me off my chair. For those of you who are not familiar with the Chiron cycle, it is currently about 50 years….so it’s a half century ago that Chiron was about to enter Pisces the previous time.

The conference, themed “Psychedelic Science in the 21st Century”, began yesterday, and continues until two days before Chiron changes signs.

One of the presenters will be this Stanislav Grof, mentioned in the article. When Chiron entered Pisces 50 years ago, it didn’t pass over anything in his chart, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t significant. First, he has the entire sign of Pisces intercepted in his third house of the mind so Chiron spent the sixties opening mental doorways; and second, shortly after Chiron changed signs it opposed Stanislav’s 9th house Neptune.

Psychedelic explorer & co-founder of transpersonal psychology

He won’t be at the conference, but another psychedelic explorer also shared a Pisces-dominated 3rd house. But in Timothy Leary’s case, Chiron touched his Uranus in Pisces shortly after the 60′s began.

Richard Alpert (Ram Dass) was a colleague and close friend of Timothy Leary’s, and another psychedelic pioneer. In his case, Chiron entered the opposite house, the 9th, shortly after it opposed his Neptune, and hung around this house for most of the 60′s. He was touched on a very personal level by Chiron, passing as it did over his 9th house Venus. (I remember reading his book in the 60′s, and thinking at that time that it was a perfect manual for living. The book title was very Chironic, falling as Chiron does between Saturn/the past, and Uranus/the future: “Remember Be Here Now”)

I don’t explore psychedelic frontiers anymore (yes, I did dabble a bit in the 60′s), but I would love to attend this conference. I always knew that the potential medical benefits of psychedelics were worth accepting the risk of potential dangers…. I guess I saw even then the Piscean 2 fish swimming in opposite directions, before Chiron was even thought of.

So now, to quote the title of a book by another psychedelic explorer, Aldous Huxley, we are about to enter a “Brave New World”. What will we be saying about psychedelics 50 years from now, when Chiron returns for yet another cycle?

For those interested, here is info on that conference:

http://www.maps.org/conference/

And here is the link I promised you to that article:

http://www.alternet.org/story/146393/how_stanislav_grof_helped_launch_the_dawn_of_a_new_psychedelic_research_era/

Peace, Love and Granola – Redux

Chiron moves into Pisces on April 20, then will retrograde back to Aquarius July 20, then back into Pisces on February 8, 2011 where it will stay until 2018.

The last time Chiron moved into Pisces was when I was a little kid, March 26, 1960. It did the same thing then, too, going back to Aquarius for a few months, then moving into Pisces on Jan. 20, 1961 where it hung out until 1968.

A lot of people feel that Chiron’s entry into Pisces was one of the major influences on the era we now lovingly call “The Sixties”. The Pisces symbol is two fish swimming in opposite directions, and the sixties were certainly polarized. Pisces rules drugs and mysticism, spirituality, psychic influences….sounds like a lot of the 60′s that I saw. I was reading the Pisces profile at http://www.skyscript.co.uk/pisces.html and kept seeing the 60′s over and over again in the description. If the 60′s were a person, Pisces would have to be very strong in their chart!

So years from now, will we look back on this decade with similar memories?

A lot has changed in 50 years, mind you. In the 60′s, we were barraged by television news footage of the Viet Nam war and the antiwar protests, while today many people sit in front of computers rather than TV, watching YouTube footage of the Iraq war and the antiwar protests. In the 60′s, newspapers and magazines like Time and Newsweek were frequently filled with stories about the dangers of LSD, police busts for drugs, and debates about making Marijuana legal, while today the news media talks about the dangers of drugs like cocaine, the war on drugs, and debates on making Marijuana legal. In the sixties, people saw the future as a blend of end-of-the-world fears (with songs like “Eve of Destruction”) and dreams of paradise (“When the Moon is in the seventh house, and Jupiter aligns with Mars, then peace will guide the planets, and love will steer the stars,” while today the internet is full of end-of-the-world talk (just how many websites ARE there about 2012 being the end of everything) as well as talk current events being the birth pangs of a new, wonderful New Age we will soon all be living in. What goes around comes around?

I came of age at the end of the 60′s, and have a lot of fond memories, as well as memories of doing some of the most stupid things possible. Most of my peers will say the same thing if asked.

I like to compare Chiron in Pisces with a scene from the Wizard of Oz. Chiron opens doors to worlds one did not even know existed, and like Dorothy when she looked through her Kansas house doorway into the Land of Oz, one can’t help but want to explore this wonderous new world that was beyond anything previously imagined. There is so much to see, like “the horse of a different color”, so many new people to meet, like Glinda and the Munchkins, but also unbelievable dangers, like falling asleep and not waking up in a field of poppies, or making extremely dangerous enemies like that ‘other witch’.

This Chiron in Pisces won’t be a mirror image of the last time, to be sure. A lot HAS changed in the world, some of it for the better, some of it for the worse. But I think you will see the door opening into another world once again and, like Dorothy, will have the opportunity to experience the two fish going in opposite directions….untold wonders, and unimagined dangers.

Let’s hope we remember where we’ve kept our ruby slippers.

Jupiter & Chiron & Neptune, Oh My!

There are a lot of blogs on the web talking about the Jupiter/Chiron/Neptune conjunction that we are experiencing.  It’s definitely significant because it doesn’t occur very often (the last one was over sixty years ago), and because of the many parallels that are surfacing between the last time (Autumn of 1945) and the present time.

But I’d like to look at it from a slightly different perspective.  And I want to start with a special song:

Happy birthday to you,

Happy birthday to you,

Happy birthday dear Neptune!

Happy birthday to you.

Ok, so it’s not Neptune’s actual birthday.  But we are currently seeing Neptune return to the place it was at its discovery for the first time.  We are in, therefore, a Neptune Return period.

Neptune was discovered (aka ‘born into humanity’s conscious awareness’)  on September 24, 1846 at 12:15 AM LMT in Berlin, Germany.  At that moment, Neptune occupied the 8th house at 25 Aquarius 53 R, with Saturn quite close at 25 Aquarius 08 R.   David McCann has some very interesting things to say about this conjunction in his article at http://www.skyscript.co.uk/neptune.html, but I’d like to quote this part:

“it takes a lot of Saturn to bring Neptune down to earth. This conjunction seems very characteristic of the Victorian age: hard working and capable, but often unable to find the balance between the materialistic and the visionary.”

While it may have helped teach us a bit about Neptune by giving our understanding of Neptune some form and structure, it also put restraints/limits on Neptune as well.  Perhaps the universe felt that to present us Neptune unbound, right away, would cause many of us to go insane?

In any event, we’ve had 165 years of trying to learn about Neptune while Saturn stood guard.  I’ve always felt that was like saying, “Ok, I want you to open up to the universe….but only this much, within these limits.”  In other words, learn all you can about becoming one with the all….just as long as you continue to think within the box…for your own safety, of course.

This year, Neptune began the first of three passages over its discovery position on April 11, 2009.  Of course, Neptune was 25 Aquarius 53.  But take a look at Chiron’s position then:  25 Aquarius 02.  See how close it was to Saturn’s position in the discovery chart?  Six minutes from exact.  I’d say that was close enough to warrant the assumption that it’s trying to tell us something.

While Saturn structured, put limits upon all that Neptune symolizes, Chiron open doors to let Neptune out, or to let us out to see Neptune…often in places where we didn’t even know doors existed!
While Saturn may have tried to get us to bring into our reality some
of the more universal principles, Chiron I think is getting us to
look at the universal principles by encouraging us to think outside of the box.

The second Neptune return will be on July 17.  You know Neptune’s position.  Jupiter will be only 28 minutes away, at 25 Aquarius 25, expanding, enlarging, pushing.   But guess where Chiron will be?  EXACTLY conjunct the discovery Saturn, 25 Aquarius 08.  And if Chiron is opening those doors to Neptune…Jupiter is pushing and shoving us through them, making it near impossible to dig our heals in.  We are going to HAVE to think outside the box.

The third and final Neptune return (at least in this lifetime) will be
February 27, 2010. Jupiter has, of course, moved on by then. But Chiron is quite close to Neptune now at 25 Aquarius 34.  And…what’s this?  Lovely Venus will be 25 Aquarius 07.  (That Saturn position is quite popular right now, it seems.)

With Jupiter’s place taken by Venus, perhaps the pushing and shoving is over.  But Venus definitely has her ways of getting what she wants.  This final Neptune return, Venus will be trying to pulls us towards the doorways by making what’s on the other side seem attractive, tempting, irresistable.

Think of it this way:  We’ve just finished up the first Neptune Cycle.  Neptune’s beginning another journey, and we’re lucky enough to be alive to catch the first ‘wave’.  But as most people who study cycles know, cycles are not really circles.  Each cycle marks another level of a (hopefully upward) spiral, and while there is some familiarity as we move through similar points on the cycle (i.e. Neptune moving through the degrees of each sign), each level is full of ‘new’, each level teaches us things beyond our ability to understand during the previous cycle.

So the first cycle began with a conjunction to Saturn.  It was the only way we could deal with the principles of Neptune then….by putting them in terms of the personal reality we knew and held on to for dear life.

But this cycle is beginning with a Chironic note….let’s not let our personal reality limit our exploration of the universe.  Let’s look for a reality beyond that….a larger reality….a super reality.  And in doing so, lets heal our wounds, listen to the teacher’s wisdom, and (surprise, surprise) discover just how beautiful the universe really is.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy

I’ve gotten used to people calling me “Mr. Chiron” or “The Chiron Man” over the years, and have even grown to like it. (In fact, I even went so far as to appear at recent lecture in a specially designed shirt with the Chiron symbol on the front, reminiscent of Superman’s “S” on his outfit, and “Mr. Chiron” on the back. It brought a lot of laughs.)

You could say I have a real fondness for the little maverick body. Before it was discovered, I was just an astrologer, but the moment, back in 1977, that I read the New York Times headline, “Tenth Planet Discovered”, I turned into a Researher, consumed with an unwavering hunger to find out anything and everything I could about this new body. Chiron changed my life.

It wasn’t long before I had several dozen other astrologers involved, and I’d say we knew more about the astrology of Chiron within a year after its discovery than was known about Pluto even twenty years after it was found. And this was pre-Internet!

Chiron has become a standard astrologial tool. True, they were wrong about it being the ‘Tenth Planet”, but it can be found in just about every ephemeris in print today, and I don’t own a single astrology computer program that doesn’t include Chiron. One of the first things I ask at each lecture I give is, “How many of you know where your Chiron is?”, and invariably I’ll get a show of hands that includes 100% of the room.

Yet, even though we’ve been studying it for over thirty years, there is still so much more to learn about this body that was named after the wisest of all Centaurs.

And Chiron’s discovery opened the door, allowing a whole herd of other bodies to stampede in. Research is being conducted on a whole stable of other Centaurs, such as Pholus, Nessus, Chariklo and Asbolus. New bodies are being discovered out past Pluto that are changing the face of astrology almost daily, such as Sedna, which goes out farther than any other known body, or Eris, which some astrologers consider an excellent candidate for the long sought-after co-ruler of Libra.

When I started learning astrology, there was a nice, comfortable set of bodies. We all knew that a horoscope consisted of the houses, the Sun and Moon, eight planets, and a pair of lunar nodes. That was it (and if you were a practitioner of Vedic astrology, you didn’t even use Uranus, Neptune or Pluto.)

But when Chiron was discovered, I began to understand how Shakespeare’s Horatio must have felt. I soon learned that there are more bodies in the heavens than I had ever dreamt of, and they influence us here on Earth at levels I never knew existed before.

This is a fantastic time to be an astrologer. The universe is showing us its secrets at an ever-increasing rate. I can’t wait to find out what’s next.