For anyone who has been to Burning Man, a week-long festival in the high desert of Nevada, this photo will evoke the feeling of the event. This view is looking toward the playa, at a typical street scene at dusk. "The Man," at the back right, is a wood, metal and neon sculpture that stands about 60 feet high, and which provides a dependable reference point to get around the temporary city of 50,000 that appears on the desert playa each year. Photo by Eric Francis.

Note to Sunday Readers:

Last September I published an article about Burning Man as part of the Planet Waves series of Friday essays. The article describes the Burning Man event, gives some of its history and explains how it serves as a vital cultural ritual to help people transform and embrace the changes our society is going through. Here is that edition. For those who want a perspective from 11 years ago, here is the last article in my original Burning Man series from the summer of 1999. This has some great quotes from the founder of Burning Man, a guy named Larry Harvey, as well as a description of the “pre-9/11 world” from the summer of 1999. For fans of KPFA radio in Berkeley, there are some amazing scenes in this article. –efc

Today’s Oracle takes us to the Gemini weekly of Apr 25, 2002

If that bit of reality known as your sex life has been below par lately or if your par has been below par then these are good times for a renewal of your erotic cycle. Sometimes your erotic cycle is like a motorcycle. You need to change the oil do a lube job put a little rubber on the wheels and maybe rub in some body paint. Then you take it out in the country for a nice long afternoon in the fresh air where there aren’t a lot of people and you can do anything you want make a lot of noise and go really fast or maybe very slowly in a soft fragrant meadow by the side of a brook.

(The Daily Oracle is a random selection from one of 10,000 Eric Francis horoscopes. New horoscopes by Eric are published weekly plus twice a month in Planet Waves Astrology News and Planet Waves Light. The Oracle itself is a divination tool available to subscribers to either of these services.)

Anatoly Ryzhenko

In 2004 when I was visiting Spain for a month, I posted an ad on Craig’s List in Melbourne for a web assistant for a project, and a guy named Anatoly responded.

The website I was creating was a side project called Planet Waves Parenting (which never quite took off). I had him redo the front page template about 12 times before we got it right, and that was my big clue that the guy was great. He has turned into our best friend here at Planet Waves. His role is part technical, part spiritual. He produces all the content you see, for example, this and many other Word Press blogs. He can plow through work like few people I’ve ever met. Yet I think his role is mostly spiritual. I think of him as Buddha with a Bulldozer. I can be a moody, overworked Cancer rising; he is consistently cheerful, alert, and ready to tackle the next five projects. And he is our highly protective chief of security.

Anatoly creates the pages of Planet Waves Astrology News each Tuesday and Friday, and then manually inserts as many as 100 edits in a typical Friday edition, one at a time. In other words the pages are not created “by computer” but rather by hand — and that is why they look so good. Together, we put the same kind of care into emails that goes into designing print pages.

He and I have worked together around the clock for six years. We’ve spoken maybe 15 times in that time span — our relationship is part psychic, part Internet. He is a graduate of the Russian navy, as a member of a submarine crew. He has knowledge of Latin, having translated a book of 50,000 quotations from Latin into Ukranian (with a collaborator). And it seems the best part of his life surrounds his wife Iren and his daughter Kate, who is seven. He lives in the Ukraine, halfway between Odessa and Kiev, a mysterious, ordinary part of the world I hope to visit some day.

Anatoly turns 37 today and I thought I would introduce him, thank him for his amazing work, and let him know how much we adore him.

Today’s Oracle takes us to the Taurus monthly of May 1, 2002

Do you question everything you do? Do you need to? You are prone to unexpected fluctuation more than you think. The rock-solid, stable nature of Taurus is more of an identity than a reality, and more a reaction than a cause of action. That there are two very distinct aspects to who you are goes without saying. But now you’re likely to be aware of as many as a dozen separate parts or inner facets that are vying for the number one spot in your world. There is also one huge, wide-open space within, a slowly-emerging core mystery like none you have ever confronted, perhaps scary, perhaps enticing, that is more deserving of your attention and dedication.

(The Daily Oracle is a random selection from one of 10,000 Eric Francis horoscopes. New horoscopes by Eric are published weekly plus twice a month in Planet Waves Astrology News and Planet Waves Light. The Oracle itself is a divination tool available to subscribers to either of these services.)

Dear Fellow Traveler:

Mercury is about to be retrograde, beginning Friday. This is one of those events we all agree has an effect. Some people love it; it gets their creative energy jumping. Other people lose their keys six times, get their cell phone cut off, have their Yahoo account hacked and bounce the mortgage payment. Occasionally it can lead to significant problems — and just as often, truly helpful solutions and shifts of awareness. I’ve often noticed Mercury retrograde as the moment where the truth reveals itself, or (in a Chiron-like way) we discover the flaw in a system just in time.

In a special audio edition of Planet Waves, I’m taking a closer look at the Mercury retrograde experience and exploring both why it’s so potent and how we can use it to improve our lives. For the next few weeks, Mercury will be retrograde in Virgo, one of the signs with which it’s the most closely associated.

My take on this particular retrograde is that it’s reminding us about unfinished healing projects. What are those projects? What has changed since we forgot about them? Where would be a good place to resume where we left off, and what can we safely move on from? I’ll be looking for ways to help you consolidate your efforts, as well as to focus on specific issues and ideas that will assist like leverage points.

Another angle of this retrograde involves our typical state of mental overload. We wouldn’t get into that, you know, scattered, stretched-thin state of mind, if we didn’t have certain predispositions, and often these are oriented in the past — as mental patterns. Mercury trekking backwards through Virgo will help us clue into the nature of those patterns and give us some hints about what to do with them. Where any of us has Virgo placed in our charts is an aspect of life where we need to be less self-critical, more self-supportive and relax our perfectionism. I would count those as healing goals, and I’ll be reading the charts from that angle as well.

For subscribers, this is a 12-sign report — all the signs for one price. This will enable you to listen to your Sun, Moon and rising signs, as well as those of the people you care about. I’ll present it in an audio package with introductory materials that explain Mercury retrograde in general (offering insights into the more common themes of avoiding bad purchases and our continuing relationship to technology) and offer deeper ideas about this particular one. Then I’ll take the signs one-by-one in 15-minute presentations.

The report is scheduled to be ready Friday afternoon, the day Mercury stations. I’m offering it now for the pre-order price of $24.95. This includes all the introductory materials and all 12 signs. The price will go up to $29.95 after the report is released (or the signs will be sold individually). The report will include an overview of the Libra equinox chart — which includes a Full Moon on the Aries Point the day of the equinox.

Pre-orders will be sent access information and you’ll receive an email as soon as the report is posted. This promises to be a fun, useful project — and one that has a value that will outlast the current astrology as a dependable resource.

Once again, here is your pre-ordering page. Thank you for your business and happy retrograding!

PS: Here is last year’s Mercury retrograde report — a written edition that was a bestseller and got great reviews. There will be much more information for the 12 signs in this audio edition.

New edition of Planet Waves Astrology News.

Today’s edition of Astrology News, which has been sent to subscribers, also includes an interview with me about the relationship between astrology and technology. The interview was originally intended for one of the big gaming websites — they didn’t publish it, so we’re running it here. This is a sample of the interview. -efc

A lot of people don’t believe in astrology. What do you say to them?

Astrology is a tool like any other. It works, but I think it needs to be mixed with plenty of real-world knowledge and experience in order to have ethical grounding and actual use. Here’s an example: You can be a database programmer and be very good at programming, but unless you know how people tend to think and work, your databases aren’t going to be convenient to use. You need to know almost as much about people as you do about computers. If you follow the basic lines of human thought habit, you can create intuitive programs that ease our lives mentally, and help people unfold their potential.

Stan faces down his Facebook profile, after getting "sucked in," from South Park Episode 1404: "You have 0 Friends."

Astrologers need to work in the same spirit. We need to remember that people are quirky, that we’re all unique, and most of all, that symbols stand for something else. The thing that distinguishes astrological symbols from many of the symbols that we typically encounter (say, for example, in commerce) is that they’re so well used by so many people that they are archetypes.

Carl Jung gave us this term. Archetypes are a special kind of living symbol which moves down the ages and which exists in some form in every culture. Many or even all of them are already in your mind when you’re born. Imagine if the characters on South Park had been around for 3,000 years, and revered by many of your ancestors and billions of people down the ages, collecting momentum in the genetic memory — that’s what astrological symbols are like. They have residence as living psychic entities in our minds and bodies; they have gravity and cycles. That’s why the concepts associated with them have such validity on the human level. They’re not external to us; they’re part of us.

The virtual world to some extent demonstrates that there is existence beyond the body, as does astrology — we’re overcoming this belief that everything is strictly limited by physical reality. To get into virtuality we need these interconnective devices. So far there are no psychics I know of who can get onto the Net with their minds, but the time may be coming. Without the need to use any equipment at all, astrology can demonstrate that we’re all part of the same reality, and that communication extends beyond the body and the known senses. We try to emulate this with all of our technology. That emulation, much like astrology, can point us toward the reality, or it can keep us trapped in a little model of reality.

Today’s Oracle takes us to the Leo monthly of Feb. 7, 2005

A theme has been developing through the past four seasons and it’s coming to full fruition now. That theme is your relationship to groups of people and to society itself. For most members of civilization these relationships are lived in a state of sleepwalking or by reflex. People ‘have their place’ and exist in a fixed pattern to the people in their lives. Every social or domestic routine you’ve known is developing into something else probably more complex and certainly more evolved — but in any event designed to allow you to become the person you are certainly becoming.

(The Daily Oracle is a random selection from one of 10,000 Eric Francis horoscopes. New horoscopes by Eric are published weekly plus twice a month in Planet Waves Astrology News and Planet Waves Light. The Oracle itself is a divination tool available to subscribers to either of these services.)

Reflect on these facts from our friends at wikipedia:

The 2010 Pakistan floods began in July 2010 after heavy monsoon rains, largely affecting the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. At least 2,000 people have been killed and more than 722,000 homes have been badly damaged or totally destroyed. The United Nations estimates over 20 million people are suffering with over 160,000 square kilometers (one-fifth of Pakistan) affected as a result of the flooding, exceeding the combined total of the affectees of 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the 2005 Kashmir earthquake and the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Around a fifth of Pakistan’s total land area was impacted by the flooding. UN Secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon said that it was the worst disaster he had ever seen, and asked for an initial $460 million for emergency relief, 20% of which had been received as of August 15, 2010. Extensive damage to infrastructure and crops significantly harmed the struggling Pakistani economy.

This year it seems our planet Earth has been tumbling around the roulette wheel, too frequently landing on the letter “C” – for cataclysm.

This makes five so far for 2010: the earthquake in Haiti, the Icelandic volcano, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the heat wave and massive fires in Russia, and now the floods in Pakistan.

In the US, a comparable disaster this magnitude would drown all coastal states. California, Oregon, Washington would be gone. The east coast from New York to Florida, and the Gulf states would all be under water. Yet, as 20 million Pakistanis struggle to survive the aftermath of these terrible floods, aid is still just trickling in.  So far, the aid they have received falls too far below the requested UN aid, which addresses the country’s immediate needs as the monsoon rains abate and waters recede so that rescue and recovery can commence.

But its the longer term costs of returning 20 million people to a new “normal” life that should concern us. The recovery of this fragile state happens under a web of immense political tension:  Pakistan borders India, our economic partner, and Afghanistan, where we are waging a ten-year war. The weak government in Pakistan, a nation with nuclear weapons, is focusing all its efforts on disaster relief while the Taliban, like a spider, lies in wait for opportunity.

Continue Reading »

By Len Wallick

Tomorrow, Friday August 20, Mercury stations retrograde at one minute before 4 pm EDT at 19+ degrees Virgo. This is an event that takes place three times in most calendar years. This corresponds directly to the fact that Mercury goes around the Sun about three times in the period that it takes the Earth to go around once. This particular year we get to experience most of four because one was already in progress when 2010 began.

Not all Mercury retrogrades are created equal. Granted, all of them have a great deal in common. In addition, the sign or signs in which the retrograde takes place, and even the degree at which it stations are subject to subtle cyclic repetition. However, the location and direction of that sign’s ruler, the orientation of the luminaries and the placement and direction of all the other planets are never precisely duplicated. Thus, every retrograde period develops a theme of its own.

The first thing to realize about any retrograde is that it is an illusion of perspective. There’s not much difference in the actual speed at which planets move but the varying size and shape of orbit will create a difference in the apparent speed. To simplify, the planets on the inside lanes will lap those tracing a longer ellipse. This creates an observational experience somewhat akin to being on a train that starts to move forward, making the stationary train on the next track appear to move backward.

Another thing to know is that when a planet stations it turns on a dime and gives you ten cents change. One moment it is slowly moving in one direction. Then, precisely the same moment it is slowly moving the other way. No, there is no stationary moment. Just think, if you could do that, you would either be a superhero or a very highly paid athlete. Continue Reading »