Posted on June 14, 2020 | Link to original
Dear Friend and Reader:
With the beginning of Mercury retrograde in Cancer this week, we are now in the cluster of events surrounding the northern solstice (summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere). Concentrations of aspects form peaks right around both the northern (Cancer) and southern (Capricorn) solstices this year, through which there will be a lot of movement and a sense of uncertainty.
While this will settle down by the end of the year, the question is, where, and how? In other words, in what territory will society stabilize for a while? I think that in the United States at least, this is up for grabs.
Here is your clip-and-save summary of the northern solstice cluster.
Notice how many events are in aspect to the Aries Point, which serves as an intersection between personal and collective events. This has been the theme of our lives since the most recent solar eclipse on the northern solstice, which took place June 21, 2001.
Thursday, June 18: Mercury stations retrograde in Cancer.
Saturday, June 20: Sun enters Cancer; squares the Aries Point. Summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere; winter solstice in the Southern Hemisphere. Sun aligns with the Tropic of Cancer.
Sunday, June 21 (Father’s Day in the U.S.): Cancer New Moon; annular (not annual) solar eclipse in Cancer, square the Aries Point. This corresponds to the Sagittarius lunar eclipse that took place on Friday, June 5.
Thursday, June 25: Venus stations direct in Gemini. It has been retrograde since May 13.
Saturday, June 27: Mars enters Aries; conjunct the Aries Point. Mars will make a conjunction to Salacia in Aries, a square to Pholus in Capricorn and conjunctions to Chiron and Eris, all on the way to stationing retrograde on Sept. 13.
Tuesday, June 30: Jupiter conjunct Pluto (with Pallas Athene right there) #2 of 3 (the one exact from a heliocentric perspective). The first conjunction was April 4 and the third will be November 12. Jupiter and Pluto align like this about every 12 to 13 years depending on where Pluto is in its long cycle. Adding Pallas Athene, the asteroid of politics and law, points to the theme of this event.
Wednesday, July 1: Mercury retrograde square Chiron; Saturn re-enters Capricorn in retrograde motion.
Think of this as a tricky interchange where three freeways merge, and there is an off-ramp every six seconds while the guy in a Mercedes with Massachusetts plates is tailgating you at 78 miles per hour and you’re not sure where you are but you want to get where you’re going on time.
Do not reach for your coffee! Do not answer the phone! Just keep driving. I know it’s challenging.
The truly odd thing about this time in history is the sensation of the private existing in public space nearly all the time. This is largely a result of digital technology. It’s not just that digital facilitates things like breaching tens of millions of credit reports, Social Security numbers, credit card data, medical records and so on.
People are conditioned to experience themselves as public, with no privacy, despite the seeming obsession with privacy. Then many will publish everything about their lives to social media — more than enough for anyone to build up a psychological profile without any need to pry behind a password.
How many people will consent to placing contact tracing software on their phones, to “test, track and trace” policies, and to answer questions about their movements and personal connections without an attorney present? [Note, in the United States, you are not obligated to answer questions from any lawful authority without an attorney present.]
So on the one hand, we insist on privacy and security and on the other, many are willing to surrender these things with little thought, or none at all. Now is the time to pay attention. We are at the crossroads or the six-way intersection. Think before you sign, and before you click “agree.”
There is another approach to this whole matter, which is to recognize that in the digital environment, privacy does not exist in the way that it did in the analog, in-person environment. We are all public people, though not everyone planned to be that way.
The thing to do is to remember where you are at all times — not as in GPS but in terms of using your senses.
With love,
PS — I was grousing around the old archives and found an article from 10 years ago this week, called The Greatest Aries Point Show on Earth. It was a time when the eclipses were hovering around Cancer and Capricorn, and Uranus was sitting on the Aries Point itself. This pointed to much that happened in 2011: Fukushima, Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street and much more. This article contains quite a bit of astrological detail, Aries Point theory and a visit with Djwhal Khul, or the Tibetan, the in-body master whom Alice Bailey said she was channeling.
PPS — The reason I was in the archives was that I was digging out my coverage from late 2012, for one of our newer editors who was not around at the time. Twenty-twelve is now back in the news, in the form of some hilarious assertion that the date was off by eight years and this is really it. I have been saying something akin to this for weeks on PWFM, in the form of: we got all that 2012 in 2020. The three from that autumn that I found were: Something about Juno, then The Mayans, Juno and the Abyss, and We’re About to Go Off the Map, which we indeed have. In one article I wrote, “Sounds like a good excuse for a party. We are doing fantastic. Today I am baking a cake and finishing up my list of resolutions for the new baktun, and a separate list for the new piktun. This is a special moment.”