An astrological perspective on Kingston’s future

Editor’s Note: Most Planet Waves creative activities take place in a small city called Kingston, NY. The Kingston Times, our local weekly, did a year-end article on what its two supposed prognosticators think about the future of the city. Gerald Celente is one of the world’s best-respected trends researchers, who I’ve mentioned once in Planet Waves. However, my esteemed neighbor is the voice of doom, and I don’t want to give any more cloning power to his predictions — so I’m just going to post an excerpt of the Kingston Times article, with apologies to its author, Dan “D.X.” Barton.

When Dan asked me to look at the city’s charts, I searched around for some record of the city’s establishment as the revolutionary capital of New York State, but could find nothing specific about the actual date. (I am sure this can be recovered, but I didn’t have time to go full-bore.) However, soon after it was made capital, the Brits landed here and burned the place down. And, a time for the event is recorded in history. I was pretty amazed at what came out: among other things, an exact (to the degree) Moon-Chiron conjunction in Aries, which is currently right under transiting Eris. Big stuff for a little town of 23,000. If there is reader interest I can post the chart and host a conversation about why I chose that one and not another. –efc

by Dan Barton

It may ultimately be folly, as reality continually outstrips our imaginations, to try to predict the future. But it’s an undeniable aspect of human nature, the urge to cast one’s mind into the unknowable and forecast what will happen.

In that spirit, and because this is the time of year when we all naturally think about the shape of things to come, we sat down over the last few weeks with two of Kingston’s most noted prognosticators, Gerald Celente and Eric Francis Coppolino, to take their minds on what the city might expect. They take different approaches: Celente’s Trends Research Institute has for 30 years combed through, refined and analyzed vast tides of information to point the way through an increasingly uncertain global and domestic environment; Coppolino, who writes the astrology columns for Chronogram and House magazine, uses the time-honored practice of astrology to counsel his clients on how the motions of the heavens affect their lives down on Earth. (Big snip.)

Astrologers make their forecasts by drawing up “natal charts” based on the subject’s date of birth and location. (Astrology holds that the position of celestial bodies and the patterns they form at the time of birth determines if not everything that will happen to them, a great deal.) Coppolino chose as the birth-point of Kingston Oct. 16, 1777, at 9 a.m., when the British started attacking it in earnest. He sees that incident as the key to understanding why the city has its problems.

“I would say that city is starting to be confronted by its ‘stuff’,” Coppolino said. “As I have felt for a while before seeing these charts, there is an emotional issue. I would say the city has never recovered from being burned down. I would say that it’s still traumatized. There’s an insecurity involved and kind of an emotional rawness that manifests as immaturity — there’s an “I want my mommy’ complex the city has. When you’re 232, you’re too old to still want your mommy. Kingston has to grow up and act like the emotionally mature adult that it should be. It has the complex of an emotionally abused child. There is still a boundary transgression against it.”

Coppolino cited the moon conjuncting Chiron (astronomically, a planetoid with an orbit between Saturn and Uranus; astronomically known as “the wounded healer” and believed to be important in figuring out how to turn trauma and weakness into strength) at the time of the burning as the basis for his finding. “There is an emotionally driven intensity – it’s kind of a raw quality, and the immaturity manifests as a ‘me’ complex, a self-centeredness that occurs in the city as a whole and the people involved. You can almost say the city has kind of an ‘orphan’ quality to it. It was orphaned too young and nobody raised the kids.”

Coppolino said the chart indicates the city’s problems are and will continue to manifest themselves as “chaos that is emotionally driven. It’s been part of this city’s story for a long time. It’s as if the city is dragging something behind it from its own past that it can’t let go of.”

Coppolino said he would advise Kingston’s leaders, if they were his clients, to put aside their egos. “The government needs to acquire the humility to understand that it’s here to serve the people — it’s really a ‘serve or suffer’ chart. The government does not exist for its own sake, and the government needs to understand that. The sign involved is Virgo. The government needs to have a more Virgo-like quality — more virtuous, more oriented on service, more oriented on actual scholarship.”

He also thinks the city needs more young blood. “The first thing most young people do when they get old enough is leave. They follow Lou Reed’s advice — that the only use for a small town is to get out. You don’t have people who grow up here, stay here and love it here for the most part.”

Rather than resisting the unusual and innovative, Coppolino said, the city should embrace and celebrate it. “One of the things I would advise Kingston to do is have a lot more tolerance for the weird and count itself among the weird. It should embrace its identity crisis.”

Also a problem for the city is its being made out of three separate settlements, which has resulted in Kingston being badly laid out and hard to get around. “If Kingston was my client, I would advise it to get a feng shui practitioner,” Coppolino said. “And since we can’t rearrange the roads, bury some crystals.”

Coppolino also advised an increase in unity. “The city needs to find its niche, and to find its niche, it’s going to need to pull together. It’s not going to pull together until a new leadership style is embraced, a circular leadership style or a style of leading from behind,” he said. “Not this kind of typical pyramid-style of government that we have, where so much abuse of power is possible.”