An Albatross, Eating from the Hand of a Sailor

Dear Friend and Reader:

We have arrived at the last weekly edition of Planet Waves in this, our 26th year of publication. The Awakening, the annual edition, will officially be published Monday, the day of the Capricorn New Moon.

The New Moon is conjunct a centaur planet, Pholus (discovered in 1992; coincidentally its orbit is just under 92 years). It crosses the orbits of three planets — Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — which is what makes it a centaur. They are all orbit-crossers. Chiron is the most familiar in this group of minor planets. They all point the way to where we may retrieve what feel like elements of lost soul; they are keys to seeing in the dark.

Each has a specific emphasis or theme. Pholus describes the small cause with the big effect. This can be a “one thing leading to another” kind of situation; it can represent an action taken with the consequences unforeseen. Were they predictable? Maybe not — but there are usually warning signs that things are not going to end well.

Pholus encompasses unheeded cautions, betrayals of commitments made in the past, the release of ancestral karma, and — from its mythology — being starstruck by celebrities who often get us to do whatever they want.

For Monday’s lunation, Moon, Sun and Pholus occupy the same degree, and the luminaries align with Pholus to about 14 arc minutes. There is a lot of emphasis behind this lunation, which commences the lunar month wherein Donald Trump will be inaugurated the 47th president.

The Albatross Enters the Scenario

Seeing this cluster together in one degree of Capricorn, I went to the Sabian Symbols, one of the original degree-by-degree interpretation systems. The degree has as its symbol: “An Albatross, Eating from the Hand of a Sailor.”

The albatross is an incredible bird. It looks a little like a giant seagull. It can fly 500 miles a day with the occasional flap of its wings, which can measure 11 feet across. It rides the wind like few other birds. They do not make good pets.

I was not familiar with the albatross as a totem, so I went to my critter-meaning go-to, Ted Andrews — but surprisingly, albatross is not in his lengthy section on birds.

An internet search led me directly to the 1834 poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from which this creature gets most of its renown. The Royal Museum Greenwich website writes:

“Rime of the Ancient Mariner tells of the misfortunes of a seaman who shoots an albatross, which spells disaster for his ship and fellow sailors. The seaman, who is the ancient mariner of the title, then roams the world retelling the tale of his cursed journey.”

The Mariner believes that the winds have failed due to the “unlucky omen” of the albatross, but killing the bird brings even greater peril upon the ship and its men. The mariner is then forced by his crew to wear the dead albatross around his neck as punishment, which is the source of that expression.

Acting Without Heed to Consequences

This is a story about acting without regard for the consequences. And that is the caution of Pholus. In fact that is the caution of our lifetimes: we are fond of unleashing one genie after the next without the least thought of what might happen. One thing just leads to another. The iPhone was a cool idea. Now it’s not only your music library — it’s the digital ball and chain you drag everywhere with you; the auto-hypnosis devices nobody wants to live without.

This digital object is now the key to the physical world, whether we’re talking about one’s “vaccine passport” or how you cannot get into many venues without a ticket displayed on your phone.

These pocket computers transform us, compelling a psychic recreation of the user. They make high-pitched anxiety seem like a normal state of mind. I am impressed by the extent to which some of my friends are swept away by predictions of disaster and doom. People are fragile in that state. If we are not subject to the rule of tyrants, we are often submissive to our fears.

This is the sweeping panic we see in society, where there is never a calm day and nothing good ever happens except maybe your kid’s birthday or getting a puppy. Get some social media accounts and terrorize people and you too can make a good living. The reason you can is because that is mostly what people want to buy. It’s a crude dimension of human nature that thinks if we live in fear, then we will somehow ward off the thing we are worried about.

But the effect is the fear itself. For most people, the test of truth is how frightened something makes someone.

We are perched on the brink of God-knows-what. To find astrology comparable to what we’re about to experience, you have to search by century, going back to 1 B.C. — as far back as most programs can go.

More of What Has No Precedent

There are viable comparisons around 1450, 1850 and through the 1920s. But the astrology of 2025-26 describes new forms and colors, and wider impact through the planet’s communications systems. To me that suggests we will encounter (more of) what has no precedent, and find ourselves in uncharted lands and waters. This can mean many things, and one of them is creative potential — which includes self-creative.

Pluto in Aquarius describes a time when people are likely to do what other people are doing just because they are doing it — and this has long been a situation.

The challenge of Pluto in Aquarius will be standing apart from “collectives,” especially of the digital kind. They are usually no such thing. Most people know how to think for themselves, except for the part about caring how other people might respond. That defeats the point, doesn’t it?

When the albatross is eating from the hand of a sailor, the great creature is responding to the human overcoming their fear. We could use more of that.

With love,

Your faithful astrologer,