By Mysti Easterwood

Human potential and self-awareness are something we could do with a lot more of right now. I keep hearing people ask when everyone is going to wake up; this aspect looks a lot like an awakening. I would be more optimistic if I heard people ask about when they are going to wake up. — Eric Francis, Cosmic Equinox

Tomb of Sauro-Sarmatian priestess from Prokhorovskaya culture (east of the Black Sea, near the Turkish-Iranian border, in approx, 4th - 2th century B.C. (probably much older). Excavated by Jeanne Davis-Kimball.

This week has seen the opening of a 10-day international music festival called South-by-SouthWest here in Austin. It’s the very essence of Vernal/Aries/Creative energy is roaring through the city. Since my health club sits at ground zero (well, on the 8th floor) of the festivities, even without the $500 pass, I am marinating in its ambiance.

Yesterday, with Dawes, John Hiatt and Carolina Chocolate Drops playing downstairs in the lobby of the Hilton (off the schedule), I met with longtime Hindu Tantrika Paul Garza. We met to discuss what a Tantra-101 class taught in the West might look like. My background in Tantra is Buddha-flavored, so we’re cooking up a view from both sides of the tradition.

One common ground we quickly reached is what Tantra is not. For example, it is not — per Robinson Jeffers — the “Indian recession.” In this context, recession, referred to in a poem by Jeffers, means a way to escape reality.

While its Asian expression has been shaped into a passive, quietus-seeking, transcendentalist appearance, Tantric practices were first the province of Scythian warrior priestesses, whose Awakening was part of a very active life, one lived mostly on horseback. Scythians were a culture located in what is now western Iran, before the Persians, contemporaneous with the Hellenistic Greeks, who called them ‘Amazons’.

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Note to Readers: This is a sample of the full edition that went out to subscribers this morning. You can have access to my full analysis and all 12 signs of interpretation by subscribing to Planet Waves Astrology News. More information about this product, our organization and the work that I do is in the links to the right side of this page. — efc

Dear Planet Waves Reader:

We’re about to experience a spring season like no other. It has an ordinary beginning, more or less. Here in the Northern Hemisphere, spring begins when the Sun’s rays square the equator, just past noon in the Eastern U.S. zone on Saturday, March 20. We’re currently in that brief phase where night and day are equal around the world. In the midst of this, the Sun enters the sign Aries and the new astronomical year begins. There are a few extra planets in Aries — at the moment, Venus and Mercury, and of course, ultra-longtime tenant Eris.

Late winter light near New Paltz, in Ulster Country, NY. Photo by Eric Francis.

Aries is a cardinal sign, which means if all goes well enough, it arrives with strength, determination and initiative. Think of all the energy rising out of the ground: seeds bursting into bloom, trees creating tens of thousands of new leaves to harvest the newly-available rays of the Sun, animals birthing and even people taking a moment to feel alive.

Part of our spring cleaning/revival is that Mars stationed direct on March 10. Mars is the ruler of Aries and the energy of the sky is now focused here. Despite a brief Mercury retrograde coming in a few weeks, and the fact that we will need to use some of that Mars direct energy cleaning up the mess made by Mars retrograde events, we are on solid ground. The thing to watch for is oppositions: you will have to do your part to sidestep needless contention and controversy. Keep your encounters real; choose well.

I say this recognizing how challenging life is for how many people right now, even the ones with homes and jobs and health insurance. The relentless 2012 quality of “everything, all at once” is still influencing our lives, and will be for a while — particularly as the energy picks up over the next two months and everyone of every psychic shape and vibration responds their own special way to the conditioning forces that surround us.

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Source: Rachel Maddow quoted by two readers.

As quoted from Rachel Maddow, the House of Representatives posted its revisions to the insurance revision bill on Thursday at 2:07 pm, starting the clock for a vote 72 hours from that moment.

We really must make a study of the money angles of this chart. And that Venus in Aries on the MC sure looks like Bam is gonna pull it through with the sheer force of executive charisma.

I’ve been having a series of revelations on the theme of writing about sex, and why my writing strikes some people as controversial. In a thread below that has racked up more than 80 comments, I describe the connections between sex and astrology in theoretical terms: using the astrological houses as a model. Fair to say that my ideas about sexuality and astrology inform one another on a regular basis, and I’ve learned a lot from both reading charts and listening to people. I see the potential in my own chart and I do my best to live up to it and honor the mission I perceive (Cancer rising, Aquarius Moon conjunct Vesta, 8th house, and a bit of Chiron next door in Pisces). Studying astrology opens up a whole dimension of veiled information, much of which involves perspectives on how self encounters self, and how people encounter one another.

Vestal Virgin tends the sacred hearth.

The first issue I’m aware of is that I don’t conflate relationships, sex and romance. I don’t conflate sex with morality. Being natural, sex is inherently moral. Relationships are inevitable. When people get to know one another they often want to share sex. It’s been said that put any two people together long enough and they will become sexually curious about one another. (And we know it often doesn’t take long at all.) I strongly encourage and celebrate sexual curiosity. I believe it’s one of the highest forms of curiosity and self-awareness.

In my view there is no ‘right’ format for relationships or for sex except for some grounding in authenticity. People who take a view that sex must only happen with certain people under certain conditions may find this pushes their buttons: morality, control, disease anxiety, whatever.

I am not saying that sex is appropriate under any special conditions, either — only that the short list is waaay too short, and that we have a lot of room to conduct ourselves ethically under an expanded or more relaxed relationship model.

Next, I bring a value to all of my writing, be it about sex or astrology: I encourage women to be as free in their relationships as they want to be, and as sexually free as they want to be. I believe in free love — the freedom to love, and the freedom to choose our lovers. I encourage women to lead the way, and to be self-aware enough to choose men or other women as lovers who honor their individuality. Men could make some progress here as well, and I am open to that conversation.

I have focused my writing for an audience of women, who I perceive as as having an especially complex situation to work out, due to the conditioning that many receive — what I call the guilt issue.

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By Len Wallick

Almost there. This coming Saturday, March 20 at 17:32 UTC (1:32 pm EDT) the Sun’s rays will squarely encounter the equator of our little planet with an angle of incidence equaling ninety degrees. Everywhere on our stony wet sphere, every living thing will receive a square deal of equal days and equal nights, for about one week centered on that day. Equator, equal, equinox: just recite that three word chant a few times to yourself. Feel the reality.

At the exact time of the equinox, the Sun moves into the sign of Aries. Of all the calendars and all the new year days, this one seems the least arbitrary and most resonant. To start over again from equality shared at a point of balance. Equinox is the last of the New Year holiday events. The first is the Pagan New Year, in November, followed by the winter solstice, followed by our civil New Year, followed in turn by Asian New Year, which leads to the vernal equinox.

As of today, the Sun is still in Pisces. All around the wheel, the cusps are crowded on both sides. Its almost as if the luminaries and planets are queued up to pass through security checkpoints or just having done so. Can you imagine what contraband they smuggle, what treasures they carry?

Joining Sol in the last degrees of a sign are Uranus (also in late Pisces) and Neptune (in late Aquarius) and Chiron (in late Aquarius, still just one degree from Neptune). There’s Ceres (in late Scorpio). There are other Centaurs: Chariklo (also in Scorpio), Thereus (in Taurus) and Cyllarus (Gemini). Asteroids Klotho (time, history, story), Magdalena (the free woman), Sphinx (the presence of a mystery), Siva (sound, ritual, transformation), Atlantis (the use and abuse of technology; ethical issues around technology) and Sisyphus (the work we do that seems to get us nowhere) are in aspect to the Sun as well. There is always a lot going on, when you look at the small planets, and they tell a story. It just might take a while to see what it is.

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Today’s Oracle takes us back to the Gemini weekly of October 22, 1999

Somewhere back in your karmic files is a detail about how you tend to attract sexually repressed people, and it then becomes your job to get them, well, over the hump. There are worse jobs you can have in this world. Lately, though, even the most dazed, confused and shutdown people in your vicinity have been awakening, or at least in my opinion they should be, and you’re in a perfect position to provide an outlet for their newly discovered, if momentary, lapse of erotic denial. Cut these folks some slack. Ask them what they need, and what they want. They’re complicated beings. Not that you are so simple, but at least you can see in black and white instead of a thousand shades of gray.

(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.)