By Len Wallick

Appropriately, the Moon spends Thanksgiving Day in the sign of Cancer, encouraging the fortunate among us to enjoy the blessings of home, hearth, family and dining table. But if we remember this year’s American holiday for anything, it will probably not have to do with any lunar aspect. For the auspicious details, we should look at some relationships between the planets.

Mercury squares Jupiter today to bring what we know of the world to the dinner table, possibly cooking a goose or two in the process. Hopefully just warming a few buns. Geometrically, a square is 90 degrees of separation between one point and another on the circumference of the zodiac circle. In terms of the ancient elements of western natural science, a square is a relationship between either fire and water or air and earth. In terms of the qualities, squares are most often associated with the cardinal signs. Psychologically, the aspect is expressed as synchronizing with tension internally felt, requiring individual action to resolve.

In order to put this particular aspect into perspective, we need to go back about a month.

Ever since Mars took up with Eros and skipped into Sagittarius late last month, things have shifted. By leaving Scorpio, one of the signs it rules, the red planet subjected its expression to Jupiter which traditionally rules two signs — Sagittarius and Pisces. Mercury followed Mars into Sagittarius, the final fire sign, also disposing itself to Big Jove. Thus as a combination of position, direction and influence, Jupiter assumed hegemony in the sky. Venus returned to Libra on the same day Mercury departed Scorpio through the other door and served to keep the scales from tipping overly much. On the whole however, the shift we felt was from the personal to the trans-personal as expressed through conscious experience. Somewhere along the line, November has born witness to a little more of ‘we’ and a little less of ‘me’.

Underneath that trend there was a complementary current that invoked an ‘us’ carrying with it the polarity of ‘them’. It has to do with a series of aspects and the prototypical example of same. Remember the gauntlet of successive Gemini-Sagittarius oppositions that Luna had to run earlier in the week? That line-up has been there for a while. Mercury and Mars have also been part of it and subject to it as well, emerging into the latter third of Sagittarius as if into a new chapter. Lagging further and further behind the red planet it is Eros’ turn, but the quality of the experience has changed. Not because the opposing asteroids have changed, but because of what identity Eros itself is bringing to the table. Now it’s not so much a gauntlet as a hall of mirrors.

Continue Reading »

Today’s Oracle takes us to the Taurus weekly of Dec. 7, 2007

You can feel the circumstances and needs from the opposite viewpoint, and you may be discovering that it’s not so opposite after all. That is the interesting thing about role-reversals — they reveal what we have in common more than they reveal what is different. The floor remains open for further discussion of the possibilities, and you may be piecing together the fact that your gain benefits everyone; another person’s gain benefits everyone; your mutual gains are good for all. You can at this juncture afford to set aside some of your conservative tendencies and explore possibilities that would have made you nervous to even think about not so long ago. That is the benefit of authentic confidence rather than its fade or image.
(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 posts are below this notice!

Dear Planet Waves Reader:

Cosmic Confidential was our bestselling 2010 annual edition of Planet Waves. It was a breakthrough annual edition, the 12th that I had done. It really felt like I had completed the Labors of Heracles, or as I said earlier in the year, learning astrology again from scratch. Our annual includes extended readings for all the signs, plus a diversity of articles, audio and other resources.

We would like to offer all readers the opportunity to explore the full website as our gift, through the long holiday weekend. So we’ve removed all the passwords to the signs and the content areas.

Here is your link to the full site, and here is a direct link into the 12 signs of astrology. I know this is a busy weekend for many people, so we will leave the site password-free till Monday night at midnight California time. I highly suggest you read your Sun sign and your rising sign. If you don’t know your rising sign, you will need your birth date, time and place and then check with a free charting service like Astro.com.

This invitation into Cosmic Confidential is designed to give you an idea what I do with the annual edition. I’m now at work on the 2011 annual. Please watch your email over the next few days for a one-time special offer on Light Bridge, the 2011 annual edition of Planet Waves. That email will be clearly marked “Light Bridge Special Offer.” It will be a 24-hour offer, so you will need to act on it promptly — then Light Bridge will go up to full price.

Wishing you an excellent weekend –

Yours & truly,

About 10 days ago, I cautioned in the subscriber edition of Planet Waves (“And What Are We Attracting?”) that we were heading for what appeared at the time to be an imminent international confrontation of some kind. “It looks like some hotly polarized, extremely exaggerated international situation that pops up seemingly out of nowhere,” I wrote in that edition. We now have a clue what I was seeing in the chart: the situation that emerged between the two Koreas on Tuesday, Nov. 23.

Chart for the beginning of the Korea situation on Tuesday. Notice the Aries Point rising, and Pluto in Capricorn on the Aries Point (via Capricorn) on the midheaven, at the very top of the chart. Also notice the Gemini Moon is opposite the alignment of Pallas, Mercury and Mars in Sagittarius.

Accounts as to what happened vary, but the result was that North Korea began shelling a military base on the South Korean island of Daeyeonpyeong, one of several islands collectively referred to as Yeonpyeong Island. North Korea stated that it had responded after the South had recklessly fired dozens of shells into North Korean territorial waters around Yonphyong Islet. Naturally, there are two sides to the story, though it seems unlikely that South Korea would start firing shells to the north ‘recklessly’. Anyway, the result is that we have one of the worst conditions between these two nations in decades.

MSBNC is reporting that the United States’ George Washington aircraft carrier battle group is on its way to the region. U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak, a former admiral who once commanded that carrier group, is saying he believes we’re deploying it to the region as much to be in a position to retaliate against the North as we are to be preventing the South from over-reacting. He said the chances of the situation escalating are “pretty darned low” if we handle things carefully and use China as an ally. China is the one country with any real influence over North Korea. (Notably, during the Vietnam War, China was working against the United States by financing North Vietnam. It truly is interesting how things change.) Sestak, a member of the House Armed Services Committee (an influential House of Representatives committee), said he believes that U.S. military resources are severely depleted by our involvement Iraq, and that we don’t have much left to handle a military situation on the Korean peninsula if push really comes to shove.

Continue Reading »

I am currently holed up, at the tail-end of Africa, with a bad cold — and my intention to write an article on The Devil and The Star has been stymied until I’m back on my feet again. Which is why I’m so grateful to my colleague, Emma Sunerton-Burl, for stepping into the breach as a guest writer this week. Emma is a tarot reader, teacher, and counsellor. You can visit her website here. — Sarah

By Emma Sunerton-Burl

Often when we read tarot for ourselves, we have a position in the spread which is the focal point of our reading. It might be the outcome card, it might be the ‘card to focus on’, it might be the ‘key’. It is the card that we are most drawn to and seek answers from.

La Papesse (The High Priestess) from Jodorowsky and Camoin's Tarot de Marseille.

Sometimes in readings this card we are drawn to is the very one that we understand the least — or in a particular reading it seems not to provide the direct answers we usually gain or expect. This is a good time to build your tarot knowledge, both in a traditional way and in a very personal way.

These perhaps confusing yet central cards hold a key for us. There are a number of different ways to approach this:

– the academic study
– the meditation
– the journey
– the holding the card with you through life

I want to focus on the last of these here, but before I do I will briefly talk about the others to give you an idea of what I am not meaning with the last one.

The first is to use the books you have, the online resources you have access to and to read all anyone has ever seen in the card — and go with those statements and concepts you have a intuitive reaction to. You are starting to gain a deeper understanding of the card and how it relates to you specifically in your situation; and you are adding to your remembered bank of card meanings.

In this section I would also include studying the things that have been associated with the card by the deck creator, so, with the Thoth for example, you may also be going to references about the astrological associations of the Thoth card you are dealing with; the Kabbalistic position of the card; the meanings of the sephiroth or path connected to the card.

Continue Reading »

Today’s Oracle takes us to the Cancer weekly of Dec. 14, 2002

It is true, the stakes are getting higher. You also seem intent on looking for the dark cloud inside the silver lining, and it is perhaps a good idea to be a bit cautious when things look too bright and sunny; I have read that more car accidents happen in fair weather than bad weather. So drive your car with care and awareness, but rather than bracing for impact, I suggest putting your energy into deciding where you want to go. More harm can come from your doubts than from any other source. At the same time, you do need to have answers to your questions and reasonable certainty that people will come through with their promises. Look inside yourself for the origins of your misgivings. You did not invent them, but you do carry them, and only you can let them go. The sooner the better.

(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 Friend and Reader:

Your podcast is ready — here is the link. In this edition, I look at the Sagittarius alignment and its relationship to the “national security” news we’re being pelted with: the TSA patdowns and naked x-rays if you want to get on an airplane, as well as the skirmish-standoff episode between North Korea and South Korea.

I look ahead to the Sagittarius New Moon on Dec. 5, which is conjunct the Great Attractor, Pholus, Ixion and Hylonome — several points that bring big energy to the mix.

I offer my holiday travel advice owing to the forthcoming combination of Mercury retrograde, solstice and eclipses at holiday time, when so many are so frantic. The upshot — take it easy, stay ahead of yourself, plan for contingencies (i.e., travel with some food and a pillow, in case you end up spending extra time at an airport) and do less rather than more.

Have yourself a safe and sane weekend –

lovingly,

by Carol Van Strum

“Wars and a man I sing…”

– Publius Vergilius Maro, aka Virgil (70-19 B.C.), The Aeneid, opening line. Translated by Robert Fagles, 2006.

An American hero died in July. Sadly, few outside the halls of academe know or care. Whether we care matters little or nothing to him now, but matters a great deal to us.

Bernard Knox, 1914-2010. Photo By James Parcell/Washington Post, 1992

His name was Bernard Knox. An account of his 95 years on Earth would read like a John Le Carré or Alan Furst thriller: an ordinary young scholar, thrust by wartime exigencies into the world of espionage, secret missions, and unsought heroics, devotes his long post-war life to the equally thrilling — if less harrowing — search for wisdom and solace in accounts of ancient wars and passions.

Knox was born November 24, 1914 in Bradford, West Yorkshire, England. While studying classics at St. John’s College, Cambridge, he became horrified by England’s complacent indifference to the spread of fascism throughout Europe. Shortly after graduating in 1936, he joined the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. Wounded and left for dead when a bullet pierced his carotid artery, he somehow survived both his wounds and the amateur care of a young volunteer who learned nursing “from American films.” Eventually, he was shipped back to England for more professional medical treatment. There, in 1939, he married an American, Betty Baur, and moved to the U.S. to teach Latin in a Connecticut private school. Their 67-year marriage ended only with Betty’s death in 2006.

After Pearl Harbor, Knox enlisted in the U.S. Army and volunteered for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which trained him as a parachutist and dropped him into occupied France to teach explosives techniques and coordinate French Resistance and Allied efforts after the Normandy invasion. The OSS later sent him to northern Italy to work with Italian partisans. There, taking a break from his machine gun in a bombed-out, abandoned villa, he idly picked up from the rubble a miraculously intact volume of Virgil’s Georgics (from the Greek, “On Working the Earth”), which fell open in his hands to the prophetic, haunting lines:

Continue Reading »

By Len Wallick

Continuing from yesterday, this is the last of over four consecutive days when Luna will be situated in a sign opposing the sign where the Sun is. That is an extraordinary length of time for that particular aspect to last. What’s even more impressive is how this functionally extended Full Moon is winding up. If we count only the conjunctions in Gemini and the oppositions in Sagittarius, our luminary of the night chalks up no less than 18 aspects to various planets, exotics and asteroids in one day. That’s one every 80 minutes. That’s more than one for every degree. Once again, that is counting only the Moon’s conjunctions and oppositions to objects in only two signs over the course of one day — today.

Synchronicity would thus dictate that wherever Gemini and Sagittarius fall in one’s chart would bear witness to a fast and furious variety of alliances and confrontations. It could get confusing. It certainly looks taxing. It might do well to review how to deal with those two aspects. In the process of doing so we might find a singular, typifying extrapolation to simplify your day.

Conjunctions are when two bodies occupy the same degree of longitude from our point of view here on Earth. The orbit of influence that makes the conjunction functional will depend on the source you refer to. In general, anything less than five degrees apart is considered to be a single conjunction. That would make the early lunar sweep from Siwa to Diana to Psyche one committee meeting, merging the energies of all four with the sign of Gemini and the third house. Neatly opposing those three asteroids conjoining the Moon are three bodies in Sagittarius (in order): Pallas, Mars and an object that orbits out past Neptune named Quaoar.

As a way to sample and narrow things down, let us select the first pair of opposing asteroids the Moon encounters and see if we can find a theme. While the name Siwa is a way of saying Shiva in some parts of the world, it does not appear as if the Hindu god of creation and destruction is what the discovering astronomer had in mind. In 1874, when Johann Palisa identified this object of the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, he apparently drew upon a faded local mythology. In this case, Siwa was named after a fertility goddess of the orally-transmitted pagan tradition of the Slavic peoples.

Continue Reading »

Today’s Oracle takes us to the Scorpio weekly of Jan. 17, 2002

If it seems like you’re always on the brink of coming unglued but don’t that’s because it’s not glue that’s holding you together. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this yet but writing is just about the single most important activity you can engage in right now. There is no need to endeavor to write a trilogy. It doesn’t matter if you take notes in your personal phone book on your desk blotter or on cafeteria napkins. Write stuff down. Encode your thoughts in language. Trust your stars: it will be worth its weight in mithril.

(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.)