Today’s Oracle takes us to the Taurus weekly of March 26, 2004

You seem to be squarely seated in your discomfort zone, which is not an easy place for you to be. The stress of one particular adjustment, though, is compelling you to make your life really work for you, bringing up issues dating back to November 2002 that will be very much part of the spiritual territory you cover this spring and summer. Annoying though it is, this particular moment presents an opportunity to get yourself more firmly seated in your soul. It’s amazing how far we can wander and never find out until we find out.

(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.)

Editor’s Note: If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article tells you how to use the spread. You can visit Sarah’s website here. –efc

By Sarah Taylor

Interesting. When I was shuffling and cutting the deck in preparation for this weekend’s single-card reading, part of my mind was obviously still on Wednesday’s article, where we had worked with three cards. And so I started by picking out three cards instead of one.

The Queen of Swords from the Rider-Waite Smith tarot deck, drawn by Pamela Coleman Smith.

The first one is the one that I’m going to be working with today: the Queen of Swords. But I think it is significant that the second card that I had drawn was the 7 of Wands, the star of last weekend’s reading.

For me, that marks an obvious progression; and a nod to the idea that the cards are all connected, and that the stories that they tell have no end and no beginning, but work together to mirror the flow of life.

So, to the Queen of Swords — specifically the Queen from the Rider-Waite Smith deck, which I am going to be working from today.

The little white book that accompanies the Rider-Waite Smith deck has, I feel, a rather narrow definition of the Queen of Swords, associating her with such things as “sterility, widowhood, embarrassment”. That’s not to say that these do not apply, but I believe that the cards speak to our light as well as our shadow aspects, and the Queen of Swords is no exception. There is a strength and richness to the imagery that is far from sterile or austere, and, in fact, evokes a sense of the Queen as one who is devoted to nurturing her subjects using the strengths that she has as a ruler.

Court cards (i.e. the King, Queen, Knight and Page) often refer to people rather than situations or things. They tend to come up in a reading when the cards wish to draw the querent’s attention to someone in their life, or to aspects of themselves. This isn’t always the case, but I have found that my own readings have borne this out more often than not.

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Today’s Oracle takes us to the Cancer weekly of Aug 23, 2001

Your life is calming down, but it’s certainly different than it was just one short month ago. Different, as in a lot better — I hope. I also hope you’ve learned some of the tricks of making it better, which wasn’t just about some very fortunate astrology coming your way. It was about using all your circumstances as opportunities to improve your life, and doing so when you got the message that it was time for change. You did have cosmic help, though, and that help hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s right where you need it.

(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.)

New edition on its way to subscribers.

The new edition of Planet Waves looks at the Venus-Mars conjunction and its relationship to the gay emergence of recent years. To read this edition as a single-issue purchase, click here.

Alan Oken responds to today’s edition:

Nice Mr. Eric, very nice…lovely interchange between astrology and your spot on sociological views.

My take is that the evolution of consciousness requires a state of non-polarization leading to fusion of the opposites in the heart center.

This awakens true intuition, a state of being in which the Middle Path (love-consciousness-soul) becomes the dominant place of self-identification. The Age of Pisces as dual is polarizing (good/evil, God/devil, electric/magnetic etc.) and leads to suffering as it favors exclusivity and separation over inclusivity and union. The Age of Aquarius is an era of energetic fusion, and we are told in the Ancient Wisdom teachings that the Christ of our Age is called “The Lord of Synthesis.”

In terms of the results of this urge for synthesis we also find the urge for androgyny. This union of the male and female (which is the mark of every conscious man or woman) is very frightening to polarized men and woman (who populate the Republican Party — no joke!) Now androgyny and sexual orientation are not one in the same thing. There are quite a few androgynous heterosexual people–more each day, and many, many homosexuals who are not androgynous in their consciousness at all! That said, on the level of pure sexuality, the approach to the collective state of androgyny (which I believe and hope is our evolutionary destiny) is expressed in large measure by this huge out-of-the-closet gay emergence. Anyway, I will stop here as I could go on and on.

Kudos to you Eric for a great newsletter this week.

Today’s Oracle takes us to the Sagittarius weekly of Sept. 25, 1999

As the highly complex entities that humans are, we often stand in a netherworld between existing and not quite existing. This crisis affects every person on the planet. Seemingly meek folk may wonder, “do I matter?” or “do I dare?” but I assure you that these are people who, struggling as they are, exist toward the more conscious end of the spectrum because they ask at all. I propose that noticing you exist is not an easy state of mind to attain, and once you get that far, and get over being stunned, doing something about it is an even greater challenge. But I’m here to tell you the time has arrived to reckon this particular issue in its entirety.

(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.)

Author unknown…

A woman in a hot air balloon realized she was lost. She lowered her altitude and spotted a man in a boat below. She shouted to him, “Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don’t know where I am.”

The man consulted his portable GPS and replied, “You’re in a hot air balloon, approximately 30 feet above ground elevation of 2,346 feet above sea level. You are at 31 degrees, 14.97 minutes north latitude and 100 degrees, 49.09 minutes west longitude.

“She rolled her eyes and said, “You must be an Obama Democrat.”

“I am,” replied the man. “How did you know?”

“Well,” answered the balloonist, “everything you told me is technically correct. But I have no idea what to do with your information, and I’m still lost. Frankly, you’ve not been much help to me.”

The man smiled and responded, “You must be a Republican.”

“I am,” replied the balloonist. “How did you know?”

“Well,” said the man, “you don’t know where you are, or where you are going. You’ve risen to where you are due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. You’re in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but somehow, now it’s my fault.”

By Len Wallick

By the time you read this, old Sol will have both feet in Libra and the full opposition of the luminaries will have passed. This places us solidly into the transitional phase of what we have repeatedly referred to as the cardinal T-square. This is not to say that the astrology has changed overnight.

Gradually, however, some components of a long standing pattern have been changing their relationship to the rest. We are now at a point where we can begin referring to at least one of those elements in the past tense.

Go back to our little drill of drawing a circle, divided into four equal segments by a cross. Remember that? The cross in the circle is a simplified zodiac. Each line in the cross represents the beginning of a cardinal sign, a new season. Thus the circle is divided into four parts, one for each season. One line for the beginning of Aries, one for Cancer, one for Libra and one for Capricorn.

Our simplified diagram illustrated the relationship between cardinal signs. Each of the four points where the cross intersects the circle are either opposed to or at right angle to any of the other three. For a long time now we have envisioned four planets occupying three of those points.

Hence the shape of the letter “T” lent its name to the interpretation of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Pluto relative to each other. This has been our template through which we have filtered and interpreted the cycles of our solar system and the relationship of those cycles to events in our individual and collective lives.

How far away from one of those three cardinal points must a planet move before the template of the “T” is no longer considered useful? That’s a good question. As is usually the case with astrology, the answer is a matter of individual interpretation. Your faithful servant feels that for Saturn the time has now come. The reasoning is based on three observations.

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