Aries New Moon & Asbolus Anniversary

Hello — I am traveling and may be updating a little late on Monday. –efcВ 

Here is a fun one. I am not a big fan of poultergeists, however. If you have one in your house, there may be a struggling child — and you had best move them out of the building. I’m not sure what to make of them in an old police station, but there are a lot of possibilities.

Good Morning & Shabbat Shalom,

As of Saturday morning, we’re hours from the Aries New Moon. To start with, our Moonwatcher Kirsti Melto has issued a new edition of Lunations. I often co-write the piece with her; our collaboration this time was writer-editor. In it she looks closely at the New Moon chart, focusing on the minor planets. Though you may not have heard of many that she has mentioned, you can find out about many of them on Planet Waves. Sixteen are listed in Small World Stories (our latest annual edition and one home of the monthly horoscope) and many are on the free side of our website. Try googling the name of the body + the words Planet Waves and see what comes up.

Eric Francis

Kirsti writes today, “In mythology Apollo is a Sun god. He represents harmony, order and reason, while Dionysus, god of wine, represents ecstasy and disorder. The Greeks considered the two gods like brothers, and while Apollo spent his winter months in Hyperborea, a mythical land in the distant north, he left the oracle at Delphi to Dionysus in the meanwhile. Apollo was said to return at the beginning of spring.”

The other night, confronted with some more of society’s astonishing degree of sexual repression, I was doing some decoding of that situation and I observed that it has to do with how precariously the lives of so many people are stacked right now. There is the feeling that if we let go into ecstasy (and Dionysus counts for sexual because he is symbolized by erect cocks which decorated his temples like huge coat-hooks) our whole house of cards will collapse.

In a moment of stunned revelation, I wrote to my mentor Joe:

SEX IS DESTABILIZING TO THE FRAGILE STATE OF MIND THE PLANET IS IN NOW

– OR SO WE FEAR

In a sense it is absolutely destabilizing – it pops us through the dead games and into the moment.

Dead games are what Fritz Perls called neurosis — mental patterns we live out again and again, usually unconsciously but not always, and we use those patterns to stay stuck, isolated and safe from being spontaneous and free with one another. Thus, life “stays the same” in a dynamic and everchanging world — not a good idea.

Though it seems like a rather simple statement, the new beginnings thing about Aries and the Aries Moon is as accurate as we allow it to be. This week I’ve been working on Mars Calling, the first book project we’ve put our energy to here at Planet Waves, and we’ve begun with with Aries. For the past several days, I’ve been assembling everything that we’ve collected and learned about Aries, and the Sun and Moon in this sign, and I’m stunned at how accurate the mythologies around this sign are are.

The number of people who came up in our research who blew a hole into the future is truly impressive. Not just the number, but the significance of the contributions is on a truly cosmic scale. My co-writer Paloma Todd researched the Sun and with the help of a research assistant, I have been working on the Moon (we “switched genders” for the purposes of the project, with me handling the lunar/intuitive and she handling the solar/expressive).

With the Sun, names like Leonardo da Vinci and Jacques Brel come up: people whose energy and originality are still unparalleled; whose ideas we still use. Many of the most noted writers of the 20th century are Aries: Samuel Beckett and Tennessee Williams among them. With the Moon, the shocking discovery is that both Bill Gates (co-founder of Microsoft) and Steve Jobs (co-founder of Apple) not only both have an Aries Moon, they have it within one degree, and both are conjunct Eris. Eris is in Aries for a stretch of about 120 years, circa 1920 to 2040.

So this has prompted me to open a new chapter in my delineation of Eris as well, which is a strong influence on Aries and all things Aries. I’ll be finishing the draft of the chapter by tonight, with any luck at all, and we have planned a production night for Tuesday with distribution Tuesday. Sales of this product have, happily, been very strong.

Two years ago we did a marketing survey and we asked you what you wanted: the answer was more diverse products, so that is what we have been doing. It has been a learning process, and I am one of these people who can’t keep the same routine for more than a couple of months — I need constant change of my work pattern and work space to maintain my level of creative output. This whole process has been incredibly stimulating (if challenging), with some great rewards. For example, the Valentine’s Day “essay” turned into a book draft called It’s Not About Sex, its About Self.

Before that — with a lot and I do mean a lot of help — Small World Stories was developed into the draft for a minor planet book, the first of its kind. Here is a little sample, apropos of Aries — the Eris page from our Planet Wiki project.

I’ll comment on just one of the minor planet aspects today — Mercury opposite Arachne. You are no doubt familiar with Mercury, the planet of mind, ideas, communication and tricksterish unpredictability (Mercury did a lot of the work of Uranus before Uranus was discovered in March 1781).

Arachne is the archetype of the weaver-storyteller-conspirator. She is spider medicine; she is the one who spins the tale. In a word, spider is the energy of creativity.

Where you see Arachne, you can be pretty sure that a conspiracy of some kind is afoot, and I don’t mean that just in the “Watergate” sense of the word but in the sense that all things and all people are interconnected.

We may play games pretending that those connections to not exist, but life is nothing of the sort. We may pretend that we do not spin the tale of our own lives, but it ain’t that way. Look for the connections and listen to the stories that other people tell you. They each contain part of your story. If Aries is about ME then there is an interesting mirror effect when you flip that one rune over and convert it to WE.

Also of note, Asbolus (the fourth centaur planet) changes signs, something it does not do often. It takes about 76.5 years to orbit our Sun one time. Interestingly, today, April 5, is the 13th discovery anniversary of this little planet — and a meaningful one it is. In Taurus, Asbolus represents some persistence on the level of both material needs and of getting our emotional needs met.

I am figuring out that one of the reasons so many of us have difficulty with that is we don’t bother. Fear has become the global religion, and fear is the great influence not to try, not to live today any differently than yesterday and moreover, the fear to feel. Despite all that is happening in the world, and all the influences we are under to be these particular ways and crawl under a rock and stay there for a while, the option to feel always remains open.

And Aries says: be brave and do something different. This would count.

So come on baby light my fire.

Eric Francis

Minor Planet Aspects are courtesy of Serennu.

Saturday, 05 April 2008

Jupiter (20+ Capricorn) semisquare Hylonome (5+ Sagittarius Rx)
Asbolus enters Taurus (direct)
Venus (28+ Pisces) septile Sedna (20+ Taurus)
Arachne (4+ Libra Rx) sesquiquadrate Chiron (19+ Aquarius)
Atlantis (23+ Libra Rx) quincunx Vesta (23+ Pisces)
Mercury (4+ Aries) opposite Arachne (4+ Libra Rx)
Mercury (4+ Aries) semisquare Chiron (19+ Aquarius)
Venus (28+ Pisces) semisquare Nessus (13+ Aquarius)
Eros (2+ Taurus) sextile Kronos (2+ Cancer)
Mercury (5+ Aries) semisquare Sedna (20+ Taurus)
Logos (20+ Virgo Rx) trine Sedna (20+ Taurus)
Venus (29+ Pisces) square Juno (29+ Sagittarius)
Mercury (5+ Aries) septile Nessus (13+ Aquarius)
Mercury (5+ Aries) trine Hylonome (5+ Sagittarius Rx)
Amor (21+ Aries) quincunx Pandora (21+ Scorpio Rx)

Saturday Oracle – Jul 01, 2005 – Aquarius – Weekly

You are breaking free finally and at long last. Um free from what though? That IS the question. And you might want to answer that question so you don’t get yourself caught up in whatever held you down before. In actual fact you have just as much responsibility on your shoulders. What you’re doing differently is thinking of it differently. Correct? And if that alone is responsible for shifting your entire sense of burden and allowing you the feeling that this is your life which you are free to live then for the love of Venus — learn to think differently.

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