A Web of Your Own

By Len Wallick

This weekend Jupiter will conjoin Uranus in Pisces for the first time since 1334.

That’s a very long time, 676 years.

When distant planets form a conjunction, it will usually repeat three times in a cluster. A Jupiter-Uranus conjunction will happen in one sign or another every 14 or so years. Now it happens to be straddling Aries and Pisces, since it’s close to when both Jupiter and Uranus are changing signs. The first conjunction was in Aries earlier this year, and the last two (including the one happening now) are in Pisces. They all happen within about three degrees of the zodiac — close to one another. The triple repeat and the apparent slide of the event (from Aries to Pisces) is because we’re watching all this from the position of the Earth. There are retrograde phases because the Earth goes around the Sun. The dance of the planets back and forth over one another is due to an illusion called parallax movement. It’s a little like Mercury retrograde. Mercury really isn’t going backwards. It just looks like it from our point of view.

The next conjunction of these two planets in Pisces — the last of three events, for this 14 year cycle, Aries, Pisces and Pisces — will be on Jan. 4, 2011 — which happens to be the same day Pluto emerges from the shadow of its recently ended retrograde. That’s not a very long time.

Back on June 8 of this year Jupiter conjoined Uranus in Aries. Uranus was in Aries in the 1920s and there hadn’t been a conjunction of Jupiter and Uranus in Aries since 1927. So that happened much more recently than the Pisces side of this story.

The next time these two planets meet in Aries, the calendar year will be in the third millennium. Those are some of the timing facts. Let’s draw some inferences, check the history and interpret further by bringing our web story of the week to what will hopefully be a useful conclusion.

Jupiter takes almost 12 Earth years to go around the Sun and hence the zodiac. That means it spends about a year in each sign. Uranus takes about 84 years to go around the Sun which amounts to about seven years in each sign. Jupiter catches up with and laps Uranus about once every 14 years. Obviously, the spots where the conjunctions happen are not evenly distributed among the signs. There are places where the conjunctions are more frequent. There are others where they hardly ever happen at all. This implies something about the orbital periodicity of the two planets relative to each other as seen from Earth.

In astrology, if something is rare or uncommon it is auspicious. The three conjunctions of Jupiter and Uranus this year and next certainly fit that definition. The fact that that they are taking place astride the Aries point at this particular time and in the context of recent, ongoing and future astrological events weaves it neatly into this week’s story line of a web interconnected in time and on other levels.

The first thing we need to do, however, is put on the brakes and get real. In the words of the late, great Rockie (Rachelle) Gardiner, astrology is not destiny. Remember last June, the long-awaited conjunction of Jupiter and Uranus in Aries did not exactly express as we expected, did it? It got blended in and in some ways, trumped. And what about Neptune in Aquarius? Not like we thought, although that one still has some time.

Even though the astrology of our time is very powerful, the pattern has been that it is the aggregate rather than single events through which it is expressed. Ours is a time when the mundane everyday choices made by each and every one of us will count for a whole lot. Never think that you are not important. You are as crucial and vital as a queen or king. Our cumulative choices are deciding the course of history. That’s big part of the lesson from the astrology of the last few years. It is not happening to us. We simply have the opportunity to create something just as rare and uncommon as the aspects if we act consciously to do so. Those of us who don’t act leave the opportunity to someone else. Still, the history is there and it would make no sense to pretend it was not.

Four things stand out about the year 1334. The Pope of the Roman Catholic Church was named Benedict, just like now. The Renaissance was beginning although nobody could see that at the time. In China, physicians documented the first recorded outbreak of the Black Death. Finally, the sub-Saharan slave trade was a going concern, creating a pattern of socio-economic consciousness that would grow and spread to become the dark side of empire over the next five centuries.

But that was then, this was now. Other than an annoying tendency to recycle the names of non-Italian popes, there is nothing other than this rare conjunction that is the same. Ours is to spin a new web, not to get caught in an old one.

So, to start from scratch, remember some weeks ago when we asked you to draw a circle on piece of paper and divide it into four equal parts by drawing a cross on the inside? Try it again and consider that it is not so different from a common “orb” spider web in the early process of construction.

If you have never watched the process, it goes something like this. A first thread is cast into the breeze until it finds something to stick to. Then the spider reinforces this line with additional silk by making several trips across it. From there two more members (often towards the ground) to form a “y” (like a yod) or triangle (like a trine) framework. That’s like the warp fibers on a fabric loom. Strong and drawn tight.

Remember when we had you go outside and point towards one planet with one hand and in the direction of another planet with your other arm? Well that’s something like what the spider does next. Using its own body as a measuring device it constructs the circular “orbits” of what you could call the weft of the web with fibers that are looser, softer and/or stickier.

So you can see that we have had you doing what spiders do for these last few months. First tracing out the lines of the cardinal T-square (which becomes the cardinal cross upon occasion) by hand — the “everything at once, all of us together” template that we have in common. Then measuring out those arcs and constructing the orbs by using your own body, so that you could get a feel of being a part of it all. and learn in your body as well as in your mind.

On some blessed night under the stars a light will come on. The kind of light that nobody can give to you. The kind that only you can find by yourself — the king or queen you can understand only within yourself. Like the first thread going out into the wind, looking for a place to anchor, this is a tightrope for you to cross, making it stronger each time.

This web is something to build on with which you will capture nourishment. It is something to be revealed as the dew condenses on it, and to maintain and perhaps repair. Maybe it will be something that needs to be started more than once.

And if you have not started yet, the next few days are a good time to begin. Weather permitting, watch the path the Sun takes across the sky. Later that night, a couple hours after the Sun has set, go outside and find Jupiter. Rising in the East, moving across the same arc the Sun did, in the same place it was almost exactly 12 hours before.

Knowing that Uranus is very close to Jupiter, stand side-on to it and point up with one arm. With the other arm point down and away from Jupiter at the same angle the first hand is pointing up. Your fingers pointing down and away are pointing towards the Earth to the Sun’s actual position. This Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in Pisces is opposed to the Sun and when you are out there doing your little dance you are “knowing it” with your body. Isn’t that better than having some cranky curmudgeon astrologer TELL you what is happening and what to think about it?

When you stretch your arms out like that from visible Jupiter and unseen Uranus right next to each other on one side, to the unseen Sun around the curve of the earth on the other side, you are sending that first thread out into the wind in your mind. It will catch and when it does you will begin your own web from your mind to the Universe. You will have proved something and will know what it is without having to be told.

So that blows open the hidden agenda so carefully constructed over the summer. Guess yours truly should pack it up now. Will be back with you next week because we have an equinox coming up that will knock the socks off your crocks.

Folks have been talking about a climax of the T-square? They ain’t seen nothin’ yet, buckaroo.

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