Podcast: Of sex and banking — and some fantastic music

Note: Planet Waves is currently updating below this post.

Dear Friend and Reader:

This week’s podcast looks at yesterday’s Scorpio Full Moon, and how it has rippled into the world. There have been events in banking, which include five major lenders being accused of fraud by the federal government, and the accusation of rape against Dominique Strauss-Kahn. In the first story, we have banks that created the recession and were bailed out by the federal government stealing homes from people, and otherwise committing fraud in foreclosure proceedings against mortgage holders.

Eric Francis, in his podcasting studio

Then we have the head of one of the biggest organizations in the world — the trillion-dollar International Monetary Fund (IMF) and presidential candidate in France — being accused of raping a woman who was cleaning his hotel suite. Actually, it’s rape and a very weird scene, involving attempting to hold her captive in his suite. I look at Strauss-Kahn’s natal chart and talk about issues of sexual victimization. This includes references to minor planets Ceres, Nessus and Eris, as well as Black Moon Lilith.

We also premier two musicians this week. Over the weekend, I put out a call for indie recording artists — Roxie Rawson of the UK, and Paul Yates of Australia are featured today. I think you’ll really like these musicians — they are soulful, talented composers who I suspect practice a lot. Please click through to their websites and get on their mailing lists.

For other artists who have contributed — Sarah or I will be getting back to you during the next week, and if you have not already submitted some music, you’re invited to do so.

Your podcast is here — and it will appear on the old player shortly.

Eric Francis

Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s chart is below; I have just posted an alternate chart below that.

Noon chart for Dominique Strauss-Kahn
Here is a similar chart cast with data being published by Astrotheme.fr. The data is not attributed, that we can find so far.

32 thoughts on “Podcast: Of sex and banking — and some fantastic music”

  1. Haven’t been able to listen to the podcast yet, but everyone’s posts are so powerful! I had a violent dream myself two nights ago of a man abusing a woman and then headbutting her into unconsciousness after she accused him of rape saying something like “Why are you beating me when you’ve already raped me?” with much defiance. It’s interesting that what particularly struck me about that dream was the face of pain the man presented in the dream after knocking her out.

    I know my perpetrator’s faces were blank in the process of their abuse. Their pain was masked. But I also know that it was a perpetrator in a therapy session who in courageously facing his own issues of perpetration enabled me to face my own. Very few people are wholly victim. We’ve all acted out in a hurtful manner. But before this man helped me face my perpetration issues I was absolutely locked into a victim mentality. Everything had been done to me. I was unable to see or feel how my behavior had impacted others. After witnessing his work I was able to own my history as perpetrator and truly grieve and repent it. Now I know I cycle between the triangle Victim-Perpetrator-Rescuer like everyone else but the result of years of therapy is that I’m free, whenever I decide to, to step out of the triangle or not step in to begin with.

    The following is paraphrased from memory: A medieval mystic woman from England was once asked by a pilgrim why God did not punish those who were abusive. Her reply was that when God looks at us, victim or perpetrator, God only sees Pain. Only Pain. And God will not punish Pain with Pain.

  2. Thank you darkmary for sharing your story. I know three other women who, in very similar circumstances were able to talk with and change the course of a violent person whose sole intent was to harm and/or kill them.. It seems that when our humanity within can connect with another’s humanity there is space that opens up for the tortured one to become conscious. You did help him, very much. His life of perpetraton was stopped by himself that night through the humanity that your partner and you opened up for him to touch, even for a moment: his own. Much love to you.

  3. That was an horrendous experience you had, darkmary, and I am so thankful you are still alive to tell its tale. Thank you for doing so. What you and your partner were able to do with Luke in talking him down from his violence filled me with tears and admiration. It *is* tragic he didn’t get the support he needed afterwards to turn his life around.

  4. I returned to this place to search out others who might want to exchange dream stuff and was taken by darkmary’s post. My dreams are suddenly quite dark and violent and the part of me that tries to keep it light and manageable was brutalized in dream-time. I am coming to believe that I am to embrace the dark side of myself and others here on the physical.

    Regardless of my 12th House treasure, I am very moved by the incident shared by darkmary. It is a great thing she and her mate managed to survive such a brush with lunacy and rage and I count myself blessed she has shared this with me.

    I am changed by this place, again and again.

    Thank you.

    Mary

  5. darkmary,

    Your post was powerful, thanks for sharing it. It reminds me of the Navajo peacemaking ceremony in which disputes or crimes are settled by healing both the victim/s and the perp/s. Everyone the incident touches is involved in the resolution and healing. To the Navajos, victims and perps are connected as are all people in the fabric of society.

  6. Early on in the podcast today the talk of awareness reminded me of something:
    the theory that Gaia is evolving a brain.

    I guess this might sound silly to a lot of people but I really like the idea and find myself coming back to it a lot.

    I think it started wtih technology — we now have all these devices that let us communicate with each other instantaneously. This is supposed to be akin to neuron cells firing off informtion to other neurons to get the brain to think a certain thought and eventually, cause the person to take a certain action.

    This is a cool idea but now maybe it is spreading beyond technolgy. Technology is just the connective tissue that allowed the brain to get wired up, but now maybe the brain is actually starting to grow, and to get more awareness of everything that surrounds it.

    Sort of like the way a “baby brain” becomes a child brain and then an adolescent brain, and starts to notice all kinds of stuff it just wasn’t aware of before, because it wasn’t evolved enough yet.

    And if you take it a step farther, maybe we are even starting to develop a self-awareness that we are becoming the mind of the planet.

    That is the coolest thing of all — a self aware brain that understands why it is here and what it is supposed to be doing — furthering the survival and sustainability of Gaia.

  7. Thank you, Eric, for highlighting the cyclic and societal/systemic nature of violence.

    I had an experience eleven years ago that helped me understand the enormous pain that someone who is compelled to perpetrate violence carries. In the middle of the night a stranger, a 23 year-old man, broke into my home with the intent to rape me and my partner. (He had heard that two lesbians were living in the neighborhood.) He was a convicted sex offender and had only been recently been released from prison. He started sexually abusing others when he was thirteen. But, at 23, he was still just a kid himself. He was armed with a shotgun and a hunting knife and charged into our bedroom. In the mayhem of the dogs barking and his entrance I rose to flip on the light and stood face to face with the barrel of the gun. I disassociated at that point. Blessedly, my partner kept her wits and very quickly began to engage him in a conversation. She expressed concern for him and it threw him off-balance. As I slowly entered my body again I realized what she was doing and joined in the conversation; I knew it was our only hope for survival.

    To make a long story short, we both survived the long night, physically unharmed. In the course of eight hours, during most of which Luke held the gun pointed at us, we talked about everything from how engines work to Luke’s childhood to the nature of God/reality. Somehow, he slowly relented from his intention. We convinced him to leave and get psychological help. We made him breakfast before he left in the morning. We promised him we would not call the police, but we did. He was arrested, convicted, imprisoned again and committed suicide in his jail cell six months later.

    I suffered from symptoms of PTSD for years after the break-in and I am sure someone would argue that our empathy for Luke was just a case of Stockholm syndrome. But both my partner and I lived through a lifetime in that one night with that tortured kid. He needed help. To this day, I regret not being able to have helped him, to have found someone to advocate for his help in the prison system.

    The emotional, physical, and spiritual damage that a perpetrator inflicts upon a victim is very real; but that person is also inflicting damage upon themselves. We are not separate. We are connected. When one of us is hurt or heals, it affects all of us.

  8. Eric,

    I think it was my system, it wasn’t updating pages properly so I had to get out of IE and restart it. Thanks for the heads up though.

  9. Thank you, as always, Eric. I am a huge proponent of dream analysis … started, as you might expect, during the long transit of neptune over my Ascending/Mercury and Sun (joined by Chiron). I’m not much for anyone being able to define my dreams as the meaning is so personal, comes to me throughout the following day(s) and blows me away.

    The Scorpio Full Moon occured so close to my own Moon, perhaps accounted for the intense measure of the dream. It took a little doing (writing/reflecting) to figure out that quite possibly the person I witnessed covered in blook walking away from me was indeed an aspect of myself that is no longer relevant/necessary to move forward. After all that Aries energy I suppose it was time to let go of the part of me that tried so hard to get along and keep apearances. Er, that’s my sense at present.

    You, dear Eric, have such a great thing going here with the discussion focussed elsewhere I daren’t muck it up with my dream … as I’ve just done (!!) but I appreciate your note above. Bless you.

    mm.
    PS: haven’t figured out why two guys, quite gorgeous and muscle-bound, are sensuallly romping with a persian cat on the roof of the house across the street … neither of them look the least bit like arnold, btw.

  10. Carrie, I don’t know if registered users have the ability to delete their own posts. I’ll ask Anatoly. None of the editors, that I know of, have removed anything today; it’s rare that we do, and usually if it happens I’m the one who does it.

  11. Any idea where the posts are disappearing to? Just a second ago there were a couple more and now they disappeared. FB is acting up today as well.

  12. Oh and I forgot to add a heart out to Roxie and Paul for the great musical interludes. Two contrasting styles but both *very* captivating.
    Thank you!

  13. I am grateful for this podcast today, Eric. By doing this chart and throwing out an invitation for us to suspend judgement of those we could so readily vilify, and to instead open our hearts and show some compassion and understanding…….to consciously work at expanding the picture and finding some level of humanity in the situation. Understanding the many hidden sources of pain that lead to committing evil and seeing humanity writ large on the faces of those judged by the media – let the stoning begin – is a challenging thing to do but if we’ve already begun the hard work of examining ourselves in the mirror, courageously plumbed the depths of our own wounded psyches and souls, we can start to love who *we* honestly are, making it that bit easier not to condemn others in knee jerk fashion but try to empathize with them instead.

    Without a doubt, the centuries old repression and negation of the feminine, of our natural and healthy sexual appetite and of our deep desire to be intimate and naked, body, mind and soul, has poisoned how we see and relate to ourselves and each other. If, by reflecting on the natal chart of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, we might begin to see and understand our own hidden, tortured selves and appreciate how we quickly we project those wounds outwards, we might see that many in our public arenas carry around very deep wounds, passed down from generation to generation, never getting sufficient light and love to be properly healed.

    When I saw Dominique Strauss-Kahn on TV at the w/e I had a strong sense of the hell this man is living through; his face said it all. There was no surprise then to learn this morning from the radio that he’s on suicide watch. My heart goes out to both people involved in this incident.

  14. Patti:

    Thanks for the link.

    The guy should have stopped himself right when he took a breath and started to speak.

    Some people don’t know that when you put your foot in a bucket of shit, you’ll get more than a bucket stuck on your shoes.

  15. Just heard in the UK our so-called Justice Secretary waded into the Strauss-Kahn story today and has got himself in big trouble. He suggested on a radio programme that some rapes are less serious than others and should carry lesser sentences. How is this man still in a job?! http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13436429

  16. The sadness and suffering of the “victimizers” and the “victims” on this earth is truly weighty. As heavy as the planet Herself, perhaps. Thanks for your eloquence and the answer, as I see it, for all of them: compassion for them all. Whatever the “beginning source” of the hatred toward women and violence toward men, my philosophy is: now we are each, individually, responsible FOR ourselves and TO the whole. I do love the way astrology opens the door a little wider for us to view the hidden chasms which have created what we label in others as “monstrous” but are in reality our own projections of our own weaknesses and fears and individuality.

    Thank you for mentioning places for sex offending men to get support. There are Anonymous programs that ae helpful to some also.

    That the Federal Government, albeit late, but better late than never, is in the process of bringing powerful organizations to justice does not stir up my compassion in any way. A different part of me is reacting. Relief and happiness of a sort. I guess the happiness is the happiness of hope–that those who are not as capable will be watched over and cared for and treated with respect and assistance by those who at least have a position in life to do that.

    Eric, those Indy musicians are tremendous. Thank you for bringing them to my/our ears and world,
    HUG.

  17. Circumcision… definitely. I once tried to have the circumcision talk with a Jewish lover whose circumcision was so obviously so carelessly performed. I was so in love with this man and we were very close and I sincerely wanted to know more, to know if he felt remorse or loss or anger, whether he’d ever talked to his faher about it and he absolutely wouldn’t go there. I’ve had this conversation with men who were not my lovers, especially when I was doing a lot of health writing. But couldn’t get anything other than defiance and a refusal to delve into ‘the way things are’ in this instance. A deep deep wound. This was part of his Jewish identity I really NEVER understood. I still don’t know if that makes me insensitive or not…

  18. Yes; one of the big ones and why we didn’t get our son circumcised. I think words are powerful and calling it “circumcision” sterilizes it too much; “infant genital mutilation” makes more sense and casts it in the proper torture practice that it is.

  19. Eric,

    Hmmm.. A source…as in one or several? As in a societal thing or a spiritual source? Can you (or anyone here who wants to chime in) clarify that comment because I am not getting it.
    :::eyeing empty coffee cup:::::

  20. Carrie, there is a source to all this violence.

    It does not grown out of a vacuum. The antipathy and open hatred of religion toward women, toward sex and toward pleasure in general is, for certain, one of the most significant sources.

  21. Patti, that site reminds me of the study which showed that secular societies (who have more open thoughts and practices regarding sex) have lower incidents of violence. I wish I could locate that study; it was from one of my college classes. Thanks for the link.

  22. I am welcoming of discussion of dreams, but with two caveats:

    — One is that we take them as personal material first. That is to say, we don’t assume prophesy and take responsibility for all of the characters in the dream. As Melanie Reinhart once said to me, “This is a boundary issue.”

    — Second, we leave out the use of dream dictionaries that “define” symbols.

    .ef

  23. I had the most extraordinary dream last night and while I enjoy the input from the unconscious, this dream was unusually gore-filled and troubling. I came to the site today searching for further insight on Antares, thank you, Eric. Loved your newsletter yesterday … “fortune favors the conscious” … whoa.

    Should you ever want to open up your site to a dream analysis topic, lemme know. I am toying with the notion of becoming a dream coach (is that such a thing?) or finding one anyway.

    m.

  24. Today the AP wire says Strauss-Kahn is on suicide watch, as you mentioned as the possible scenario from DSK’s chart.

    Thank you for the heart and compassion of your work.

  25. I started using noon charts a couple of years ago, on advice of a uranian astrologer I met at a conference. Don’t have time to go into the details but I have found they work very well, much better than sunrise charts. If you see a chart with a time of 12.01 pm, you know that’s a noon chart, even if I forget to mention it.

    xef

  26. I Love listening to you. It sad that people do not watch the news, we are truly global and can see across the world and have an idea of whats happening. I believe that we should watch the news to be informed, and it`s interesting because if there are conspiracies the first place is to look is the news because if the news is lying to us it`s an opportunity to ask oursleves what they are not telling us. Always keep the bullshit detector charged.I am always trying to read between the news.
    You say your no enlightend master but to be able to look at any human condition obectivly with suspended judgment is powerfull, and everybody should practice it (myself included)
    Thank you.

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