Author Archives: Eric Francis

Today’s edition of Planet Waves FM was recorded Tuesday right before the Pisces New Moon, by your host, the Fire Breathing Fish. It morphs from a reading of the New Moon chart into a rant on women’s autonomy and what used to be called reproductive rights. Casting the issue as total sovereignty is more accurate. But it lacks a certain appeal — where there are rights, there are responsibilities. Privilege without a corresponding sense of duty is inherently toxic — and even well-bred royalty know this. If we’re wondering why any woman is willing to give up her rights, her autonomy or her sovereignty, the answer may be found in her relationship to being a steward of her own body and the power that it contains.

The Virgo Squad -- Betty Dodson, right, with Planet Waves friend and contributor Beth Bagner.

At a certain point in the podcast I launch into a tirade on the religious ‘right’ doing its takedown of women, and then describe a new video by my mentor and friend Betty Dodson. She’s recently come out with a new video in her series on women’s sexuality, a documentary of one of her bodysex workshops.

I highly recommend this video and I will be reviewing it more thoroughly soon. I recognize that it’s $40 so I suggest you go in with a few friends and make an evening or two of it. What this DVD offers is a model for a sane conversation about sex and sexuality. If nothing else, we get a model for how to think and how to speak — in an original way, but within a framework that includes boundaries, a sense of purpose and most important, a sense of humor.

It includes discussion of body image, sexual evolution, making choices, the struggle with sex within relationships and many other topics. Part of the problem we face is that we don’t know how to talk about sex, we’re embarrassed to do so, it rarely happens so we don’t get any practice, and we’re afraid that Western civilization (or at least our relationship) will collapse if we even try. I guess we will have to see. The problems is that we pay a price for giving up the discussion — which is that it gets taken up by someone else (the entire political machine) in a regressive and oppressive way.

It’s twenty-sodding-twelve and we’re really discussing whether people have a right to use birth control? Or rather a bunch of men who want to take public office and be commander-in-chief are discussing women have a right to use birth control? Most of the time I look at this and I cannot believe it’s even happening.

I recommend all of Betty’s videos but my personal favorite is Her Life of Sex and Art, a frank (and frankly hilarious) talk given by Betty in good old politically correct, may I please glance at you Seattle. This is Betty at her most authentic and spontaneous — an off the cuff description of her life, that is, her life of art and sex. This DVD is $10 and it’s nothing but fun. If you would like to read more about Betty, here is one of my articles about her.

Heron on a dock out behind the 7-Eleven in Montauk, New York. Photo by Eric.

The New Moon in Pisces is exact at 5:34 pm EDT, just a few hours after the Moon arrives in that sign. This is a spectacular New Moon, happening at the midpoint of Neptune and Chiron in Pisces. With precision befitting a nautical engineer, the New Moon splits the distance between these two slow-moving points.

See if you can spot the Sun and the Moon in this chart. Their glyphs are accurate pictograms, and one clue is they have the same numbers next to them. Neptune is above the Sun, Pallas is next to the Moon, and the little key is Chiron.

To one side we have the imaginal, dreamy energy of Neptune. To the other, we have the pragmatic, hyper-focused quality of Chiron. This New Moon is saying we need a balance, and it’s showing us how to create one. Notably, this is happening with Neptune brand new in Pisces, and with Chiron still a recent arrival; Pisces is very much a sign of the times, and we have to get used to spending at least part of our lives living on water.

When you think of Chiron — and I suggest you do, since it’s one of the best things about studying astrology in our lifetimes — think of it as a utility to help you access the subtle energy of the outer planets. Here we have a case in point. For a couple of years, Chiron and Neptune have been traveling close to one another, at about the same speed (Chiron is a bit faster).

If you recall there were a series of conjunctions of Jupiter, Chiron and Neptune in 2009 (those were in late Aquarius), and now over time, that conjunction has developed very nicely into a useful setup that is teaching us about working with the different elements of thought: intuition, emotion, cognition and varying degrees of focus.

Chiron is currently at the center of all of this, like a therapist coordinating a group session. Or you could think of it as an art therapy session. Imagine someone is a survivor of some emotional or psychological damage, and the therapist hands them a blank canvas and says: paint. They may have never painted before, but it’s not so much about the ability to paint, but more the creative process of opening up and putting anything at all on the canvas that helps them heal.

Through this process of art creation, they heal the trauma AND make a beautiful painting (that is, access a deeper layer of themselves that comes out as something authentic and beautiful). The process is tangible, it’s structured, it’s not so easy — but ultimately it’s rewarding and much healing, progress and success comes from it.

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Not your average sunset -- the setting of a precise conjunction of the Sun and Neptune over Fort Pond in the middle of town. Neptune is invisible to the eye but not the soul. Photo by Eric.

Welcome to an age of Pisces. Not the big kind of age — that would be 2,000 years or so, of which we’re supposedly at the end (and it’s a long ending). This is a phase more human in scale, of a generation or so. Though Neptune ingressed Pisces a couple of weeks ago, Sunday the Sun caught up with the eminent god of the sea (and of earthquakes, which often happen at sea) and formed the first conjunction to Neptune in Pisces in more than 150 years. This will happen just 13 more times between now and 2025 as Neptune makes its way across Pisces.

Chart for the Sun-Neptune conjunction earlier Sunday. You can tell there is a conjunction because both points have the same degree value, 00 Pisces 36. Note the Aquarius Moon above, and the many other points in Pisces and Aries below.

Neptune events have a way of being subtle in their obvious manifestations, at least for long stretches of time. It’s like they’re invisible or can be perceived only at the far end of our senses, and our sense of time. There is something undeniably mystical about this alignment, though we may only be able to see it out of the corners of our eyes, or notice it like the subtle changes of light when the Sun is nearing the horizon. Neptune summons us to another level of awareness, the deeper world than this that Sting once reminded us is tugging at our hand.

This may be that unusual something that’s been coming through your dreams, your fantasies and your art or music the past few days. Neptune can have a slightly narcotic feeling, or a touch of clairvoyance that you might wonder whether is real. It’s a quality of presence that most often goes unnoticed in the world, or it’s so exploited with glamour, liquor, meds and advertising that it verges on impossible to notice because the frequency is so jammed up already. That and the too-often prevailing chilly cynicism of the world are enough to make most people impervious to the subtler dimensions of Neptune and Pisces.

But let’s pretend that we’re not, for a moment. Let’s imagine we really can pick up on the imagination that this transit inspires, and think of it as what was once an opaque veil being made transparent; now the choice is whether to pull the veil back and reach in a little deeper. Where would you let your mind go? What would you do with your imagination? In what ways would you demonstrate the sense of ‘universal calling’ implied by such potent Pisces energy? Many of our readers are involved in both artistic and spiritual exploration as a way of life. Be grateful that you have those modes of expression, and take this as a cue to go deeper with them. If you long for some way to express what cannot be said in words, this is an opening, a direct invitation to take the chance.

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We’ve been through a week of exemplary astrology — really beautiful stuff: the Jupiter-Chiron sextile, which Mercury comes dancing through; the signs Taurus and Pisces involved; and Jupiter sitting right on the discovery degree of Chiron. I’ve long associated Chiron with environmental issues and the healing of the Earth. And we’re seeing a surge of activism as Uranus square Pluto — the 2012 aspect — approaches its first exact contact (of seven) in June. As part of that, many more people are going to wake up to taking care of the planet, even in the midst of our lavish, plastic-strewn lifestyles.

It's not an aspect -- it's dioxin, the most toxic chemical. To be precise, it's 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-para-dioxin, or 2,3,7,8 TCDD for short. Note the distinctive, extremely stable double benzene ring, the bonded-on chlorine and the two oxygen molecules that make it flat and therefore deadly. If it was an aspect it would be a grand sextile -- note the six-sided shape of the benzene ring. That's why dioxin is so persistent. Benzene rings last a long time.

Environmental toxins issues move so slowly and against such odds it’s amazing they get anywhere, ever. But occasionally they do. The standout event today was the EPA finally, after some 20 years, releasing its reassessment of the toxicity of dioxin.

This study — really, a review of every known study — has been brewing since the 1990s, which cannot have been 20 years ago but it was, amidst truly incredible scandals.

Those astonishing scandals (hardly the first in history; the story of dioxin is the story of nonstop coverups) were so successful at obfuscating the issues that I’ve only seen dioxin covered (or even mentioned) on television about three or four times in all of those 20 years, when really it’s so significant it should be discussed every night.

Dioxin is bad for fetuses. It’s bad for the female and male reproductive systems. It’s bad for any animal (plants don’t seem to mind it, but then animals eat the plants).

How bad is bad? So bad you’re not supposed to know about it. Let’s see if I can get the backstory into one paragraph. In the early 1990s, the paper industry wanted to cover up the growing awareness of the extreme, as in ridiculous, toxicity of dioxin. So they commissioned a reassessment of that toxicity by the EPA, figuring that they could run their coverup from there. But as the data started coming in, it was damning. Dioxin was far worse than they thought, it affected more organ systems at lower levels and more was in the environment than they suspected. The reassessment ran out of control and became the international headquarters for proving how bad the stuff really is. That was largely thanks to two scientists: Dr. William Farland and Dr. Cate Jenkins, two people who actually understood the problem and were not afraid to confront it.

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One question we can ask about the past few weeks that the Sun has been in Aquarius is, have you learned to play as part of a team without losing your individuality? That’s one of the central questions of Aquarius, and it’s worth asking when there’s activity in this sign. On Sunday at 1:17 am EST, the Sun transitions from Aquarius to Pisces — then the Pisces New Moon follows on Tuesday. The Sun joins many planets already in Pisces, and will make conjunctions to many of them over the next week or so. For one, the Sun immediately meets up with Neptune — the first Sun-Neptune conjunction in Pisces in nearly 150 years. Then the Sun will light up Chiron and Pallas, also in Pisces.

Positions of the planets at the time of the Sun's ingress into Pisces. Note that the Sun is exactly conjunct Neptune in Pisces for the first time in nearly 150 years.

But we’re a bit ahead of ourselves here, as the Sun will be in Aquarius two more days and will be making some interesting moves during that short time. First, it will trine retrograde Saturn (the traditional ruler of Aquarius) in Libra. That’s a lot of emphasis on Saturn energy, since Saturn has strong dignity in both Libra (where it is) and Aquarius (where the Sun is). What’s interesting about the setup is how close Saturn is to the edge of its sign (in the very last degree, retrograde) and the Sun will be in the last degree of Aquarius, moving forward. It’s the picture of some kind of unusual or unlikely experience on the edge.

On the edge of what? Well, what’s edgy or in transition in your life? This setup describes the potential to stabilize relationship situations, work out elements of structure and negotiate the next stage of a situation. There’s a meeting of an individual (the Sun), a partnership (Saturn in Libra) and a group (Aquarius).

There’s one more point in the setup — an odd, rarely-used hypothetical called Transpluto. Think of it as an imaginary planet that has a real effect. It moves extremely slowly and was discovered in the 1930s. Sun opposite Transpluto may feel like moving through a narrow opening with a kind of expert precision. Of course if the way is narrow, then precision is a good thing, so we can be glad both these aspects are happening at once. The precision involves what is known about a situation, or rather, what comes out. It looks like one party to the situation is handling the confidential knowledge of someone else, information they don’t necessarily feel comfortable having revealed.

The Sun late in a sign can arrive with unusual events, so watch for them and stay open. The window of opportunity may seem too narrow for passage, though the more open you are, and the clearer you are, the the better you’ll be able to handle whatever this is describing. Go through the opening consciously, taking one step at a time. Imagine the planets moving in extra-slow motion as the Sun slips through the last degree of Aquarius, moving toward Pisces. There’s significant support coming from that sign, in the form of the Jupiter-Chiron-Mercury setup we’ve been describing for a few days.

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