TODAY THE SUN will square Neptune and Jupiter will sextile Uranus in Pisces. Neptune is the god of the sea and is the co-ruler of Pisces along with Venus. Pisces and Neptune play a role in the aspects today, which makes the energy feel very receptive and very much in search of attraction.

Photo by Danielle Voirin.

Jupiter, an all inclusive energy, is in a harmonious position to Uranus. I have only been studying astrology for a year now, but it seems to me that this aspect has to do with liberating friendships and ideas.

Uranus is the awakener, and Jupiter has a deep thirst for higher knowledge. Simply put, it seems as though today may bring you to conversing with interesting people over interesting philosophical topics. You might gain some higher knowledge today that could change your outlook in the long run. With the Sun in a square to Neptune, there might be a feeling of your personality being compromised by the energy of others. Perhaps there will be a feeling of jealousy on some side of a relationship, especially if it seems as though the motives of another person are shady, or hidden.

With the moon entering Gemini today at 3:11 pm EDT, relationships in your immediate environment are emphasized, as is the ability to function on more than one plain of thought. I would call it something like “psychic multi-tasking”.

A downside to the Sun’s relationship to Neptune today is a heightened sense of inhibition due to the ego’s ripeness for change.

Fear may arise from the idea that who you are can literally be dissolved into another idea or person. If you find this to be the case, perhaps it is worth examining what parts of yourself you would like to keep, and what parts could be released in order for something else to form.

Life is an ever changing, ever shifting vibration in which all things contribute. Even if you decide to stay quiet today, you will have exercised your choice. Let it be for the better, whichever you decide!

Hi all. This is a poem by Robert Bly about the goings-on at the Bohemian Grove during the Vietnam War (depicted in the photograph below). This poem was first published in 1968. — efc

I

It is a clearing deep in a forest: overhanging boughs
Make a low place. Here the citizens we know during the day,
The ministers, the department heads,
Appear changed: the stockholders of large steel companies
In small wooden shoes; here are the generals dressed as gamboling lambs.

II

Tonight they burn the rice supplies; tomorrow
They lecture on Thoreau; tonight they move around the trees;
Tomorrow they pick the twigs from their clothes;
Tonight they throw the firebombs; tomorrow
They read the Declaration of Independence; tomorrow they are in church.

III

Ants are gathered around an old tree.
In a choir they sing, in harsh and gravelly voices,
Old Etruscan songs on tyranny.
Toads nearby clap their small hands, and join
The fiery songs, their five long toes trembling in the soaked earth.

Dear Friend and Reader:

I’VE BEEN SPENDING this last week after election night trying to catch up on some rest. As many of you who have been blogging with me this past week know, I feel as though I’ve been processing this year’s campaign through my immune system. I was working out the stress of accumulated worry over whether or not we would have the same old, or would we be bidding farewell to that phase in our history and moving on to a new chapter.

July 23, 1967: Reagan, Glenn T. Seaborg and Nixon at breakfast at Owls Nest Camp, Bohemian Grove, a 2,700-acre campground owned by a private San Francisco-based men's art club known as the Bohemian Club. In mid-July each year, the Club hosts a three-week encampment of some of the most powerful men in the world. The feeling of the place was documented in the poem, "Johnson's Cabinet Watched by Ants" by Robert Bly, first published in The Nation in 1968.

In an op-ed called “Goodbye to All That” Atlantic Monthly’s conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan wrote in what would be a ringing endorsement of Barack Obama, that his candidacy (and now his presidency) signalled the possibility of the long-awaited end of partisan politics and the culture wars born from the 1960s and the Vietnam War era. He said:

At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war—not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a mo­mentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade—but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war—and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama—and Obama alone—offers the possibility of a truce.

As a member of the latter half of the Boomer generation, I was in eighth grade when Richard Nixon beat Vice-President Hubert Humphrey for the Presidency, elected on the premise of ending the Vietnam war started by the Democrats. His election ushered in the new era of post-Kennedy Republican conservatism — strong on foreign policy and moderately generous in social programs popular in the sixties. At the time, George H.W. Bush was Congressman for the state of Texas, and Ronald Reagan completed his first year as governor of California.

The Vietnam era ushered in the Nixon-Reagan-Bush brand of conservatism, bringing us almost half a century of Republican rule in the White House, which finally ended, at least for the Bushes, last Tuesday night. It completed itself not only with the landslide electoral vote victory for Barack Obama as President, but also with the losses of John E. Sununu, Republican Senator of New Hampshire, son of former George H. W. Bush’s White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu, and North Carolina Senator Elizabeth Dole, wife of former Senator Robert Dole.

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Dear Friend and Reader,

MY SATANIC BACKGROUND kept me from going overboard with the title of this piece, but I’ve got to say that I spend a lot of time feeling sorry about the situations many villains find themselves in.

Political cartoons, like the one above, can demonize President Bush. Caricature by Allan Cavanagh.

Life for quite a few seems to go in the way that Talking Heads song tells it, “You may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile,” or “You may ask yourself: My God! What have I done?” I feel this sentiment goes especially well for our current President of the United States. You guessed it. I’m talking about how I feel about George W. Bush.

I don’t know if I would be able to live my life knowing that there are magnets out there saying things such as: “Like a rock, only dumber” referring to me. I would be totally mortified by the bumper stickers that say “Somewhere in Texas, a village is missing its idiot.”

And while it might seem sort of ironic that we go from one extreme to the other in our perceptions about him, it’s got to be pretty tiring for him. Either we think he’s a drooling man-tard, or he’s an evil genius. But not in between. What if he is a man who thought he had a good idea at the time and it totally fell apart all around him? How many of us have been there?

Last Saturday, as I was driving on some errand, I heard the Presidential address to the nation. I’ve heard a few of them over the course of these eight years, but something in the timbre of the man’s voice really struck me. He sounded tired. I thought I could detect the resonance of regret in his voice and I felt bad for him. Despite all the things that have transpired.

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Barack Obama as he appeared to millions of Americans, along with four of the president-elect's former disguises.

More on this story at The Onion.

Photo by Eric Francis.

Dear Friend and Moon-gazer,

HAVE YOU EVER noticed that when the Moon is full, you can turn all of the lights off and this silvery light will come in through the windows and fill your house with its aura? Everything is different in the light of the Moon. Colors are blanched from surfaces, textures are a combination of shadow and not shadow. It seems to me on nights like that, that the Moon is a living entity visiting us from above, peeking in all the windows to find a way in.

Tonight’s Full Moon will be in Taurus, which is interesting for a few reasons. Have you ever looked at the symbol of Taurus? It looks like a circle with a curve at the top. It is very easy to think that the curve is the horns of the bull, the Taurean mascot.

But looked at another way, the curve is the crescent Moon. The Moon is exalted in Taurus. What a coincidence! It reminds me of the Goddess Hathor from Egypt. She’s a personification of the Divine Mother, pictured as a cow-headed woman, or as a full woman with the Moon held up between the curving cow horns on her head.

The feeling, intuitive side of our natures is further highlighted by the conjunction of Venus and Pluto. As mentioned in yesterday’s aspect, Pluto is making his way slowly towards Capricorn. Venus has just scooted by on her run around the zodiac. This transit has the feeling of a hot, passionate, drive-by kiss that shakes the very core of your being and makes you hunger for another embrace like that one. It does not last long, but the feelings that it invokes will stay for a long time.

Also, the Sun is trine an astral body called Varuna. In the Vedic tradition, Varuna was the god of the sky. He was responsible for holding the horizon and making sure that everything stayed the way it was supposed to. Without Varuna, the world would have been plunged into a dark chaos. In astrology, Varuna is Truth, or the defining moment. With the Sun in a harmonious relationship with Varuna, honesty may come natural to you. The world, it seems, has enough illusions in it already without any more needing to be added. Sun trine Varuna suggests an alignment with the truth that will be beneficial to all involved.

Yours & truly,

Genevieve

Photo by Eric Francis.

Pluto, as we’ve said many times, is at the very end of Sagittarius, and today Venus is making a conjunction out on that fiery edge as it gets ready to ingress Capricorn tomorrow. Pluto to Venus is lusty, passionate, and potent; in Sagittarius, with the added spiritual or cosmic vibration, it might feel like tantric sex. There is a lighter density, waves of energy rippling through the whole energy field more than focused sensation in the body. There is a sense of meaning and rather than just feeling, but the meaning may elude words.

Venus to Pluto is also a test of, or demonstration of, one’s values.

Mercury squares Nessus, triggering deeper discussions that might not come up normally; the Venus to Pluto conjunction accents the theme.

The setup reminds us that power is enhanced by work and discipline. By discipline, I mean dedication to the achievment of a chosen goal. Work is not bad, unless you don’t care for the work. Mercury square Nessus suggests expression and thought being strained by odd situations or perhaps ‘bad blood’ from the past. It is important in these exhanges to be truthful and to be aware of your emotions. It is often difficult with Nessus to determine who is the perpetrator and who is something else It is best to step outside of the situation and try to understand the thought process that might have led you into the situation in the first place.

The Moon enters Taurus at 3:05 pm EDT. Sun sextile Saturn in Virgo.

Dear Friend and Reader,

WE’VE BEGUN WORK on Next World Stories, the 2008 annual edition of Planet Waves. You will be hearing more about that soon; I think it’s safe to say that its in full swing — I find myself beginning to obsess over the aspects we’ll be talking about during the awesome special edition of the horoscopes that comes out on January 3.

At a glance, these circles appear to slither, however, upon further study, it becomes apparent that they are stationary. An optical illusion reveals perception to be a mutable force in our lives.

As usual, there are some excellent correspondences happening in the heavens to go right along with the happenings here on Earth. There are a few outer planets pushing heavy energy out into our consciousness. I would hardly recommend sleeping late at this stage of the game, especially with Neptune having stationed direct last week (November 2 to be exact). Jupiter and Chiron are planning a little get-together with old Neptune soon and I can tell you, it’s going to be a lively gig. This occurs in late May 2009, but it has been building for years.

There are two kinds of people in the world today: those who are psychic and those who are more psychic. Okay, there are a few lizard brains who are totally, utterly shut down; the idea of communication happening “without the body” is too much for some to bear.

One way to describe psychism is a different state of awareness in which a person experiences reality as a thin film over a multitude of possibilities. It is like walking through a forest, and seeing the tracks of an animal that was once walking before you with the corners of your vision. In states such as this, it is easy to see that the future is always on its way. It is the decisions we make in the present sense that bring us to the future.

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Editor’s Note: Dani Voirin, our Paris-based photography editor, sent in this video for today’s post. She feels, and I agree, that it’s fitting for the moment we’re in today. –RA

Dear Friend and Reader,

Rahm Emanuel has a steak knife, and he’s not afraid to use it.

Emanuel, member of the House of Representatives, officially accepted the Chief of Staff position from Barack Obama. 

Rahm Emanuel, Democratic member of the House of Rep., will be Barack Obama's Chief of Staff.

He’s a Sagittarius (November 29, 1959) with a nice cluster of planets in Scorpio including his Moon, Mars and Mercury, which are all conjoined. This makes for an intense conversationalist, a strongly competitive worker, and a man with a deep set of values and beliefs about how the world should be. He brings with him a 100 percent pro-choice record and strong ties to Israel (though he has publicly declared his empathy for Palestinians). Oh, and if you thought Joe Biden spoke his mind, wait till you hear from this guy.

Mars in Scorpio reveals a competitive nature: he trains and participates in triathalons. He has a strong need and enjoyment of competition, a personality trait that he shares with Barack Obama, who works out regularly and plays competitive basketball games while he waits for election results to roll in. This is someone with a warrior’s instincts, who can be wrathful when crossed, sometimes taking his ire to whole new levels of showing his discontent. 

His Sun is conjoined with Jupiter in Sagittarius. He is a great fundraiser. Translated, this means he has an incredible ability to communicate his aim to fit anyone else’s value system. Could he sell a fridge to an Eskimo? Yes, but not if he felt like they didn’t need it; and with Saturn in its native sign of Capricorn, he’s pretty sure he knows what the Eskimo needs. 

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