Brasserie Grand Cluny in Paris, on Blvd. St. Germain in the 5th Arrond. Photo by Eric Francis.

I’ve been missing Paris lately, so I thought I would post this picture from 2005 or so. I know this is a favorite of astrologer Yasmin Boland, who lived in Paris at the same time I did, so I’m dedicating it to her.

Today the Moon in Libra and Mercury in Gemini are creating a grand air trine with the triple Aquarius conjunction. The Moon is also exactly opposite Eris at the moment, which turns the grand air trine into what’s called a kite pattern; there is a fire planet at the midpoint at two of the air positions, opposing the third. It’s easier to illustrate visually, but the pattern does indeed look like a kite — a triangle that is stretched at one end. At the same time, Venus and Mars are making a square to the conjunction from Taurus. So for today and the next few days we will experience this Aquarius pattern two ways: by trine from Mercury (flow of data) and by square from Venus and Mars, (which is less of a flow and more of a plunge). It should be vurry interesting. (I will be busy writing your midyear horoscope edition.)

Valencia, Spain. Photo by Eric.

Grand trines catch us in cycles or patterns that are easy to get into and difficult to get out of; the way out tends to be the point of the kite, and in this chart that would be Eris. She is suggesting we deal with the sense of high energy, high flow of mental power or simply lots and lots of thought by embracing a bit of te chaos; this includes the uncertainty of who we are (one of the key concepts of Eris in Aries; this being a placement that in all lasts about 110 years, which ends in 25 years or so).

In one sense, the grand trine — a highly organized pattern — has formed focusing around Eris in Aries, so it looks like we’ve piled a lot of air-sign-themed patterning (the Internet and all those portable devices, for example) around a sense of uncertainty. Why exactly does everything take five phone calls to arrange?

Meanwhile, Venus and Mars are still within three degrees of an exact conjunction, and they are moving into a square with Jupiter, Chirion and Neptune, a subject that was at the core of Friday’s edition of Planet Waves Astrology News.

Here is an excerpt, complete with the illustration:

During the next week or so, the celestial drama unfolds, if you can imagine such a thing. In astrology, imagination counts for a lot. The whole thing is a kind of legal fiction. It’s like a cartoon based on reality that creates reality as it goes; the more you notice, the more fun you have.

Celestial drama, artist’s rendition of SN 1993J. The bigger star sends seven suns’ worth of mass to its little partner, then explodes in a fiery death. Credit: ESA

Venus and Mars are in Taurus. Both are gradually sailing into a square aspect (90-degrees, fixed sign to fixed sign) with the triple conjunction of Chiron, Jupiter and Neptune in Aquarius. Can you visualize that? First Venus (the faster moving of the Venus/Mars pair) will square the triple conjunction, starting on July 1 when Venus squares Chiron (followed soon after by Jupiter and Neptune) then four days later, Mars squares Chiron. Of course, Venus and Mars will each square Chiron, Jupiter and Neptune; so this is a very complex dynamic, and it involves every sex, gender and gender role. Even a cross-dressing bisexual can’t worm out of this one.

A square also has a way of triggering events, but it has another way of being deeply introspective. It’s as if something that’s inside ripples out, as an event. Or as may be the case, a lot of events. My intention for explaining this astrology to you is so that you can use the aspects consciously and not get dragged into something negative — but rather, apply it to deepening your relationships, to raising consciousness and for some interesting sexual experiences.

To sum up in advance: the key to taking this astrology on a positive, constructive and interesting level rather than a negative and entangled one (abundant possibility here) is tossing hypocrisy out the door of your life. This astrology is a beacon for honest transactions.

There are good reasons compersion feels like such a radical idea; why for example feeling good about your partner’s relationship with someone else feels so different. To most, the notion seems unconscionable. There are the ordinary ones: we �don’t want to think about that kind of thing’ or we equate monogamy (or the appearance of monogamy) with loyalty. That loyalty is the razor’s edge between being �with someone’ and �being alone’.

But let’s say you’re willing to go past the primal fear; you’re willing to think about it, even willing to feel it, and it starts to make sense that your partner is free and part of that freedom is opening the space inside yourself and in the relationship for them to have any experience they want. Let’s say you figure out that logic leaves you no choice.

What is so loving about attempting to define, limit or control the emotions or experiences of another person? Nothing at all; we just call it love to make it sound nice. Not all monogamous relationships have this as their basis, but we tend to see and experience this dynamic pretty frequently.

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Editor’s Note: It seemed that every bar, supermarket, streetcorner and subwoofer in town had Jacko blaring through the city over the weekend. The shockwave of MJ’s passing continues to linger throughout the world, his back catalogue wailing ubiquitously through the streets, honouring and healing. As Eric mentioned previously, Nessus was the most prominent planet (really, a centaur planet) in MJ’s death chart, an energy that relates to patterns of abuse: physical, psychological and sexual. With the Moon currently trine Nessus in mid-Aquarius, below is refresher on Nessus written by Eric Francis, republished from Next World Stories, our 2009 annual edition of Planet Waves.

– Cam Hassard
New York City

Nessus is a Centaur planet that assists with identifying and healing of abuse patterns. But on another level, it reveals the complex interplay of causes and effects; of stated motives, underlying motives and of outcomes. While it can address cycles of karma, the most poignant key concept comes from Melanie Reinhart: the buck stops here, indicating that in some situations it speaks to the conclusion of the karmic cycle involved: the truth revealed, the perpetrator caught, the situation resolved, responsibility taken.

Abduction of Deianira (1617-21). Painting by Guido Reni.

Though it comes with a particularly nasty myth, its effect is not necessarily malefic; it can just as easily help with resolving difficult situations as it can be involved with their creation. Someone with a strong or well-aspected Nessus may have used their own struggle, sense of guilt and deep feeling of personal responsibility to evolve into a position of being truly helpful to others with many of the same issues. While a price was paid for this gift, few would doubt that it was worth it.

Nessus was the third-ever discovered Centaur (discovered in 1993) and was, notably, the first planet named at the recommendation of astrologers. Its orbital period is 122.5 years, and it crosses the orbits of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.

In mythology, Nessus is part of the cycle involving the deaths of Chiron, Pholus and himself. In this group of connected stories, Chiron, an immortal, was injured accidentally and dies by choice after a long struggle, during which he creates many drugs and remedies.

Pholus was killed instantly due to his idle curiosity, and his death seems to be the pointless consequence of his unconscious actions.

Nessus was killed by Heracles in revenge for having sex with Heracles’ wife Deianeira. He manages to kill Heracles in return using Deianeira as a kind of unwitting contract murderer whom he deceives into ending her husband’s life years later. Of the three, Nessus’ death is the most complex, which is noteworthy because a structural key to understanding the action or meaning of a Centaur planet is how the Centaur dies in the myth. Death, as in the tarot, represents the means of transformation.

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LIKE all students caught up in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, I was riveted by the violent confrontations between the police and protestors in Selma, 1965, and Chicago, 1968. But I never heard about the several days of riots that rocked Greenwich Village after the police raided a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn in the wee hours of June 28, 1969 — 40 years ago today.

Then again, I didn’t know a single person, student or teacher, male or female, in my entire Ivy League university who was openly identified as gay. And though my friends and I were obsessed with every iteration of the era’s political tumult, we somehow missed the Stonewall story. Not hard to do, really. The Times — which would not even permit the use of the word gay until 1987 — covered the riots in tiny, bowdlerized articles, one of them but three paragraphs long, buried successively on pages 33, 22 and 19.

But if we had read them, would we have cared? It was typical of my generation, like others before and after, that the issue of gay civil rights wasn’t on our radar screen. Not least because gay people, fearful of harassment, violence and arrest, were often forced into the shadows. As David Carter writes in his book “Stonewall,” at the end of the 1960s homosexual sex was still illegal in every state but Illinois. It was a crime punishable by castration in seven states. No laws — federal, state or local — protected gay people from being denied jobs or housing. If a homosexual character appeared in a movie, his life ended with either murder or suicide.

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Note to Readers: We are the only astrology website that we know of for which the horoscopes are a paid service — not the free thing that gets you to the site; the lure that gets you to buy more. Thousands of our readers subscribe to our Sun sign horoscopes (and have for years), which is a more direct statement than any compliment. Eric’s horoscopes have appeared worldwide everywhere from Harper’s Bazaar to Flaunt to the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror. We are posting the June 2009 monthly horoscope (long edition) to this page, just to give new readers an idea what we do. Monthly horoscopes are available to readers of Planet Waves Astrology News and Next World Stories.

BY ERIC FRANCIS

Aries (March 20-April 19)
You’ve been blessed with such unusual social penetrating power, it’s as if you had a backstage pass to everywhere — and if you haven’t noticed, you still do. The key now is being selective where you go and what you do with that privilege. The depth of this new power gives you more than you’re likely to be noticing. Consider how the patterns of the society around you usually dictate the course of your life, and by ‘society’ I mean your friends, their friends and the big world. In all these ways you have unusual mobility right now. Yet this applies to levels of your existence that are normally invisible. In truth, a universe of potential is opening up for you. The way to activate that potential is by focusing on specifically what is the most important to you; and by this I mean making a conscious effort to identify your deepest and most meaningful priorities, then sticking to them. It would make no sense to squander these opportunities on something you don’t really want, but I must caution you because that’s so inherent in human nature. Yet guilt, peer pressure (including in primary relationships), conditioning, fear, shame and lack of awareness, can make focusing on what you want seem like a very big deal. So the question is, given the opportunity to go beyond these things, would you?

Taurus (April 19- May 20)
Mars has entered your birth sign, which is putting some fire in your belly. I trust you will give that famous Taurean complacency a run for its money. I know a lot of people born under your sign, and I do mean know and love. They all admit the same thing: it’s difficult to make changes. The comfort zone can feel like climbing out of a canyon. On the most basic level, Taurus grounds stability for the whole astrological system. Yet deep beneath the crust of the Earth is a tectonic power that you know you have, but rarely tap into. That strength would enable you to make vast changes as if this were no big deal at all. What I believe entices you to keep things stable, is less about fear of the future and more about an attachment to the past. But fear plays a role you need to address. On and off for the past several months, you’ve had a tour of what tends to freak you out. There’s another aspect to fear, however, which is feeling the emotion but losing touch with what creates it. Here is the key to your astrology this month: use fear as a source of energy. Go right into it and confront it directly; or let it propel you to make the decisions that you need to make. If fear is not an issue for you per se, then make a list of your perceived limits and, one by one, take them out.

Gemini (May 20- June 21)
Often people try to be spiritual without addressing this elusive thing called the unconscious. But since it’s unconscious, it’s understandable how we might not be conscious of it. At the moment, you seem to be waking up to this level of awareness, which most would regard as deep, dark and too complicated to be much fun. Yet awareness of this dimension is precisely how we grow. It cannot be taken in especially big chunks, though at the moment if the unconscious is a country, you now have access to the equivalent of a major city. Taking this equation in parts, consider that we usually deem spiritual growth being more open to love; and this, most people struggle with. But who in a spiritual process would show reverence for the darker emotions? Usually the first impulse is to get rid of them. So what might you be encountering for the next few weeks? One is attachment. Beneath that breezy personality of yours, you can cling tightly, and that has a way of driving people out of your life. Another is a fear of change that seems to directly contradict the breezy, open-ended way you prefer to live. The two are related, and if you can get sight of that relationship and acknowledge it honestly, a dimension of love will open before you even know what happened.

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In the contact sport known as life, we have arrived at the first quarter of the lunar cycle. It’s been one week since the New Moon conjunct Vesta opposite Pluto, on the solstice. In other words, the event, aspecting the Aries Point, that sent the shockwaves through our collective emotional world and bumped quite a few people off the cosmic physical plane; and which has jolted so many of us to new levels of awareness, particularly emotional awareness.

Valencia, Spain. Photo by Eric.

The combination of energies I described in Friday’s lead article, which includes the planets I’ve mentioned above plus Venus and Mars, is about standing at the existential nexus of love, surrender, sacrifice, death and aliveness. If you feel like this is a get real moment, it is. If you are feeling like you have no idea what to do: ask yourself politely to get real, and be clear about what it’s time to do.

This is the place of focus and decision, of truth and dedication, so persistently avoided with the use of so many games, so much emphasis on the trivial, all the chatter, denial and dizziness: the place where we get to become aware, no matter how sleepy or tired or tried by the trials of life, aware that we are actually alive. That awareness inherently demands commitment: of both attention and decision.

We are at the first quarter phase of the Moon. It was precise at about 7 am New York time. The first quarter is the midpoint of the new and full phases; it’s a point of high energy, momentum, and it’s also a turning point or an evaluation point. At this phase, the Moon is now in an air sign, Libra — the easier signs for the Moon, actually – therefore it is trine Nessus in mid-Aquarius; trine Mercury in Gemini; and in about trine the triple conjunction in Aquarius. Mercury as well will trine off of the triple conjunction, ringing like a clear bell, opening a tap into that energy.

These are great days to be mindful what you think, and how you think it, and to be aware of what motivates you to do so. A lot of information is about to come in. Be as mindful as you can be. Once again: this is no ordinary time, but we’ll only notice if we stay in the moment.

PS, for fans of Michael Jackson, a reader sent in this article that reads like pretty darned good jornsoism (um, I meant journalism). It’s from The Daily Mail — a paper that, while it has conservative leanings and is something of a scandal sheet, is what I would consider carefully enough edited to consider.

We had better get used to this kind of story — it’s going to be going on for quite a while. PPS, a new birth time is going around for Jackson, purportedly from an astrologer he did extensive work with, who can now release the data. The time is 7:33 pm.I will post details in a future blog. Cam has also pulled together something from the archives about Nessus for later today — Nessus being the most prominent minor planet in the chart for Michael’s final exit.