Episodes
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On October 11, Pluto makes a station, turns around, and heads for the Aquarian frontier for the last time. As you probably know, it’s been toggling between retrograde and direct motion while straddling the Aquarian cusp for quite a while. It was in Aquarius for ten weeks back in the middle of 2023 and returned to Aquarius a second time between January and September 1st of this year. That’s the day it re-entered Capricorn for a final time. After making its station this month, Pluto turns direct and arrives solidly in Aquarius five weeks later, entering it on November 19th where it will remain for the next nineteen years.
As ever, when a planet makes a station – in other words, stands still, about to turn retrograde or direct – its energies become very focussed and intensified. For that reason alone, October promises to be a very Plutonian month. On top of that, when a planet is the final degree of a sign – often called the anaretic degree – there’s an underlying sense of urgency to it. When you were in school, remember the way you felt the night before final exams? When it comes to studying, that meant it was now or never. That’s the feeling of an anaretic degree. With Pluto making its station in 29 degrees 38 minutes of Capricorn, we’re all in exactly that position – here comes our final exam.
This event isn’t just about “history” happening – it will have personal meaning for you too. Everything in the sky does. But everyone on Earth will be experiencing this radical intensification of Plutonian energy simultaneously. In other words, it’s not like a transit that hits one person very directly and misses someone else. This one is for everybody. As always, some of us will do well with it and some of us will do poorly. If “poorly” wins, it bodes ill for the whole planet.
Don’t despair – surrendering to despair is simply one of the soul-cages dark Pluto offers everyone.
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In all my years of practicing our mysterious craft, I have never once met anyone who possessed these two qualities at the same time – they didn’t believe in astrology and they knew a damned thing about it. Seeing this pair of conditions operating in the same person would be like finding a blind Uber driver or an astronaut with a big fear of heights. They’re unicorns. They don’t exist.
Once we give astrology a chance to prove itself, its efficacy simply can’t be denied.
Just this week I did a reading for a woman who teaches breastfeeding. Her chart shows a Cancer Midheaven. Chance? I just got a sad message about an old friend who died before her time. Saturn had just touched her Ascendant. Chance? As any astrologer knows from experience, the list goes on and on. All you need is an open mind. Give astrology the opportunity and it proves itself to you – or to anyone. In the right hands, it never fails.
Many intelligent, thoughtful human beings disbelieve in astrology. I wouldn’t shame them for that. They come by their disbelief innocently. Some of it is just what they were trained to parrot from an early age, at least if they wanted to make A’s in 6th grade science class. Some of it is that strange shibboleth that we call “common sense.” After all, the premise that the planets “control us” does seem implausible – they’re millions of miles away, so how could they possibly affect anyone? Why would they? And so forth.
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Missing episodes?
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I never had kids. Other than my cats, the nearest thing to children in my life has been my books – and at last count, I’m the proud papa of sixteen of them. In one way, my books are even more like my kids than my cats are. That’s because they last a lot longer. You expect to outlive your cat, but you can at least hope for the opposite with your books (and of course, your children.)
My firstborn book – my first published book to be precise – was The Inner Sky, which came out in August 1984. That’s forty years ago this month. Some of you older readers have seen your child turn forty. I suspect that’s a sobering moment – or at least one that really puts you on the map in terms of the aging process. It’s similar with books. When The Inner Sky was born, I was just thirty-five years old. Now I’m seventy-five. Knowing the book is now five years older than I was when I wrote it rings some deep bells in me.
I’d signed the contract to write The Inner Sky – and collected half of my $10,000 advance – in summer 1981. My progressed Moon had just risen into the 7th house. Solar Arc Uranus was squaring my lunar nodes, while transiting Uranus was finishing up a conjunction with my Ascendant. My chart was locked and loaded for some big, empowering changes, in other words. I dived into the writing process which took a couple of years. I wrote the whole thing on a manual typewriter and eventually mailed a thick stack of paper to the publisher – that’s how long ago all of this was. Just to be clear with any of you younger folks, on the day I finished writing The Inner Sky I’m pretty sure there were no mastodons grazing outside my window. The saber-tooth tigers had finished them off.
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Among conventional astrologers, trines are lucky aspects, period. The more of them you have, the luckier you’ll be. But to win the Gold Medal, what you really want is a Grand Trine – that’s three planets (or you can include the Angles) arranged in an equilateral triangle. You’re allowed a little slush – the triangle doesn’t have to be perfect, but it had better be close. What orbs to allow? There’s a lot of argument there – say, a few degrees, no more than seven or eight. As usual, if the Sun, Moon, or Ascendant are involved, you’re naturally a little more generous with the orbs. But even a wimpy Grand Trine will put you on the fast track to fame and fortune – that is, if we are to believe those kinds of astrologers.
Rather than labeling trines – and the Grand Trine itself – “lucky,” I prefer the word “easy.” Those two words don’t mean quite the same thing. Grand Trines do open doors and they can definitely roll out red carpets for you. That’s easily demonstrated. Do those doors and red carpets lead to good places and copacetic outcomes? Yes, sometimes. We won’t be completely dismissing the idea of simple good fortune in connection with this aspect pattern – we’ll just be looking at it a bit more cautiously. We must always recognize that like everything else in astrology, your own choices, be they wise or foolish, are always part of the equation.
Let me start with a true story. This is an edgy one about a client of mine from many years ago. I’ll call him Johnny. For the sake of confidentiality, I’m going to be vague about the specifics. I want to make sure that no one would recognize anyone involved unless they were part of my life “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.”
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When I was sixty-one years old, I met one of the two or three wisest human beings I have ever encountered. His name was Robert A. Johnson. Our relationship had an enormous impact on me, one whose effects and treasures I am still sorting out fourteen years down the road. Astrology helps!
At age eleven, Robert lost a leg when he was hit by a car. He told me that his childhood ended that day.
The year I was born – 1949 – he was in Zurich, Switzerland, studying psychology with Carl Jung and in analysis with Jung’s wife, Emma.
He was the author of many books in a Jungian psychology vein, three million of which were sold. Most of them were on my bookshelf years before I met him. They never got dusty.
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None of what follows is medical advice. In fact, I believe that as medical advice it is mostly incorrect or, at best, misleading. But it’s still a true story . . .
When I was born, the doctor told my mother that she had a B-vitamin deficiency and that it was probably exacerbated by the fact that she was breastfeeding me. To correct the problem, he recommended that she drink a pint of Guinness Stout every day. It’s true that Guinness Stout contains Folate, which is a B vitamin necessary for the production of some of our genetic materials. The trouble with the theory is that a pint of the stuff provides only 3.2% of our necessary daily dose, which means we’d need to drink thirty beers per day to stay healthy – the devil is in the details, in other words.
Mom followed the doctor’s orders, which was no hardship for her. And, since I was breastfeeding, naturally that meant that I was following them too, albeit in second-hand fashion. Before I was three months old, I had drunk a lot of Guinness Stout via my mother. Without knowing it, I suspect I had quietly qualified for Irish citizenship.
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I doubt there’s an astrology fan anywhere in the world who doesn’t realize that Jupiter and Uranus will form a conjunction on April 20. The Internet is abuzz with it and well it should be – this event is a big deal, even though it’s not a terribly rare one. With Jupiter’s quick 12 year orbit and Uranus’s slow-boat 84 year orbit, Jupiter catches up about every 14 years. Still, this conjunction is a powerful force, always guaranteed to leave its mark on the world. It’ll leave its mark on your life too, especially if you have any kind of astrological sensitivity to 21 degrees of Taurus, which is where these two giant planets line up this time. That sensitivity of course includes any aspects that part of Taurus makes to the rest of your chart. In other words, if your Sun or Moon are in 21 degrees of Scorpio, Leo, or Aquarius, this conjunction has your name on it in a big way. And no matter what your chart looks like, we’ll all be feeling it in terms of the house it falls in and any other aspects it happens to form with your natal planets.
As you explore what the astrological community is saying about the Jupiter-Uranus alignment, you’ll encounter a lot of ideas about what it means for the world as a whole. As many of you know, that’s called Mundane astrology. I remember as a teenager seeing that word for the first time and thinking it must mean boring astrology – and I have to say, my early reading experiences in the field often backed up that misinterpretation! But of course the term is based on the Romance language words for “the world” – mondo, mundo, or monde, depending on where you’re doing your listening. I have to say that at the Mundane level, the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction is incredibly powerful. It always leaves its fingerprints on the headlines.
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Getting older is a weird business. I’m quite aware that some of you readers and listeners might have no idea who Monty Python was and in fact some of you may even think he was one person. They were actually six Englishmen who formed a hugely successful comedy troupe back in 1969. It’s been said that they did for comedy what the Beatles did for music – and, give an old guy a break, you’ve all heard of the Beatles, right?
In any case, before I go any further, let me reassure you that this newsletter will be about astrology – in fact a very serious branch of astrology. It won’t just be me strolling down memory lane.
Please indulge me for a moment though. It’s December 1969. I’m twenty years old and watching TV with my parents, who were actually pretty cool. Python comes on doing a skit about a man returning a dead parrot to a pet shop. A hilarious argument ensues about whether the bird is actually dead or not, when it quite obviously is. I have tears of laughter running down my cheeks, while my parents are baffled – and probably concerned about my mental health.
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What if, right before our eyes, something far beyond human intelligence and even human intention is working to forge a survival strategy for the planet? I’d be the first to admit those words sound like wishful thinking. Watch me prove them to you.
As we contemplate Pluto’s in-and-out entry into Aquarius this year, the Internet is dishing up a smorgasbord of predictions ranging from a progressive optimist’s wet dream down to a post-Apocalyptic landscape of extinction nightmares. I believe that either of those visions, and much lies in between, could potentially come to pass. Consciousness interacts unpredictably with a wide field of probabilities and possibilities. One of them will surely happen. Which one? The point is that you are not an inert ingredient in that question. We don’t need to chew our fingernails and hope for the best, but rather to keep our eyes and hearts focussed on the higher ground and how to get there.
We all know what to wish for: world peace, justice for all, a sustainable environment, and so on. I agree, but I'm not going to harp on those obvious things. You already know them. Let’s go a little deeper into the real astrological mysteries here.
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There’s a fellow named Luis Gonzales Serra in Spain who has translated many of my books into Spanish. They’ve never been published – Luis does the translations simply as a way of studying them carefully. That’s dedication! (By the way, if anyone out there has connections with Spanish language publishing, I could happily put you in touch with Luis. It’s one of the mysteries of my life that while my work is available in at least a dozen languages, it’s never appeared, at least legally, in Spanish, even though that’s the nearest thing I personally have to a second language.)
Luis sent me an interesting question in December. Here are his words:
You have already devoted a book (The Night Speaks) to dismantling the “scientific” objections to Astrology, which I translated, with greater or lesser artistry. Perhaps it would be good for you to devote at least one newsletter to dismantling the religious objections to Astrology.
Let me begin responding to Luis by saying that religious objections to astrology are far from universal, even within the Judeo-Christian framework. I’d also like to say that those Judeo-Christian traditions are what I will mostly be talking about here, although as we explore Old Testament issues, they overlap with Islam as well. Generally speaking, the Asian religious traditions have been friendlier to astrology than the western ones.
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The bloody horror of the Hamas attack on an Israeli music festival and the ongoing bloodbath that followed it in Gaza – everyone with a heart or a soul is watching this nightmare unfold with disbelief. And of course there’s Ukraine and the seemingly endless, mindless brutality happening there. Then there’s the July 23rd headline from US News, “Six Months. 28 Mass Killings in the U.S.” Every idiot who wants one seems to have an AR-15, and nobody is safe to go bowling anymore and the kids are afraid to go to school – all because our great great great grandparents had single shot muskets, or something like that.
What’s going on? Why is everything so crazy? Astrologically, it’s a tough, multi-dimensional question. Certainly Pluto’s last gasps in Capricorn have a lot to do with it.
But then there are sunspots . . .
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On November 7 at 9:36 AM-PDT, the Sun hits exactly 15 degrees of Scorpio. That might not sound exactly earth-shaking, but if you were a Druid, it would be a really big deal. Actually, you might still be in bed recovering from the previous evening’s festivities – more about that point in a little while.
Most traditional cultures were very aware of the Summer and Winter Solstices. The noon-day Sun would have reached its highest or lowest point in the sky. The days would start getting longer or shorter. All that is fairly obvious even to a casual observer, so our ancestors figured it out long ago in prehistory. I suspect that knowledge of the Equinoxes came a little bit later – again, no one knows the date because it all happened such a long time ago, but noticing that night and day were of equal length and that the Sun now rose or set due east or due west seems slightly less self-evident than the “return of the light.”
Anyway, those four points – the two Solstices and the two Equinoxes – became the skeleton of the yearly calendar in every culture, not to mention the basis of the western Zodiac. They divided the year into four quarters – what we came to call the four seasons. Pretty much universally around the world, those four transition points were marked by festivals. Whether that was to please the gods and goddesses, or just because people like parties, is hard to say.
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We’re in the midst of the epochal, but painfully languorous, entrance of Pluto into Aquarius. We know it will change the world – Pluto’s sign changes always do – but please don’t hold your breath. The process won’t be complete until Pluto finally kisses Capricorn goodbye on November 19, 2024, a little over one year from now. And that will only be the beginning – Pluto won’t be done with Aquarius until January 2044.
Those of you who have been following Pluto’s patchwork transition know that it has already been in Aquarius once. That was for just 39 days, starting on March 23rd, 2023, whereupon it retrograded back into Capricorn, where it remains today. But on October 10th, Pluto turns direct and heads for the Aquarian frontier again. It crosses the line on January 20th – only to return once more into Capricorn on September 1, 2024 before definitively entering Aquarius 78 days later.
The push-pull you can feel in that long recitation of dates is not just happening up in the sky – it’s happening here on Earth too. “As above, so below” strikes again. The back-and-forth in the heavens is echoed here on planet Earth.
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On Friday evening, May 26, in Seattle, I presented a keynote talk at the sold-out NORWAC astrology conference. The title of my talk was one of my favorite subjects – “Reconciling Astrology and Spirituality.” We’ve put the talk up on Youtube. If you want, you can watch and listen to it for free by following this link:
https://youtu.be/tbyFL8-RhGU
Thinking back, maybe I should have titled that keynote address “Reconciling Astrology and Spirituality (or trying to.) It’s not always easy! In my twenties, I wrote my first astrology book – one that never saw print. It was basically a statistical study attempting to prove astrology in a scientific way. If you’re interested, I spoke of it in a bit more detail during that NORWAC talk. I bring it up here because one of my (many) rejection letters from publishers contained a line that I’ve been wrestling with ever since: “The thrust of modern astrological publishing is egocentric and I suspect it will remain that way.”
Yikes! Do we actually “resemble that remark?” Sad to say, the answer is often yes. There’s no shortage of silly ego-flattery in pop astrology – telling people what they want to hear and neutralizing any desire in them to improve themselves. Often such astrology encourages people to blame their problems on everyone else or on their “bad aspects.” In every case, it’s “me, me, me” – and that’s the definition of egocentricity.
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As August opens, the Sun is in mid-Leo faithfully advancing about one degree per day. Meanwhile, Venus is retrograde, having made a station near the end of Leo back on July 22nd. That means that the Sun is going forward and Venus is going backwards and that they’re locked on a collision course. The two finally come together in a conjunction on August 13th. That happens in 20 degrees 28 minutes of Leo. After that, Venus will continue to move backwards until September 3rd, forty-three days after turning retrograde. By that time, the Sun will be well into Virgo.
Built into that ho-hum recitation of dates is one of the most mysterious, elegant mysteries of our solar system: the Venus Pentangle. It will take us a few steps to understand it, starting with the fact there are two distinct types of Sun-Venus conjunctions – inferior ones and superior ones.. Most astrologers, myself included, don’t make much of a fuss about their differences, but maybe we should.
Think of an archery target with concentric rings. The Sun is the bull’s eye. The first ring out is Mercury’s orbit. The second is Venus’s orbit. The third one is us. Mars orbits further out in space, so it would be the fourth ring, and so on, out to Pluto and beyond. When Venus is lined up halfway between Earth and the Sun, we have the inferior conjunction. But then sometimes Venus aligns with the Sun from the opposite side of its orbit – that’s the superior conjunction.
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On July 12, the Moon’s Mean north node, always retrograde, leaves Taurus and backs into Aries. That means that the south node will cross into Libra at the same time. They’ll occupy those two signs until January 28, 2025 when the nodal axis shifts into Pisces and Virgo. As ever, they’ll leave an indelible stamp on the headlines – and on your own life too.
Here’s a quick review for anyone who’s not been studying evolutionary astrology for very long. The Moon’s nodes are really the heart of the system. The south node represents unresolved karma that has ripened – that means that it’s time to deal with it. The good news is that you are ready. Meanwhile, the north node suggests a powerful, effective antidote to those old, outdated south node patterns. Here’s where it gets sticky – that south node behavior comes up pretty much automatically, while reaching the north node always takes serious effort.
Want a quick reality check? Back on December 22, 2021, the south node crossed into Scorpio. Maybe you’ve noticed some dark Scorpionic karma ripening everywhere since then? For one obvious example, just two months later, Putin invaded Ukraine. To borrow a metaphor from J.K. Rowling, in classic Scorpionic fashion, suddenly “the Death Eaters” were among us. Of course, the Moon’s north node entered Taurus simultaneously – notice how difficult and far away peace has seemed since then, both for the world and very probably for yourself too? But of course, peace is the eternal cure for war. Once again, reaching the north node is always a struggle – and we need to struggle as if our souls depended on it, because they do.
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Rumors of a new world order emerging due to Pluto’s passage into Aquarius have been exaggerated – at least for now. For one thing, the Lord of the Underworld is now abandoning Aquarius (which it only entered on March 23) and returning to Capricorn, where it’s been stirring up chaos since 2008. That reentry happens this month, on June 10. Once back in Capricorn, Pluto will actually remain there for the rest of the year. We’re not out of the Capricorn woods yet, in other words.
On October 10, after four months, Pluto reverses course and turns direct, but it’s still in Capricorn when that happens. It only reenters Aquarius on January 20 of the coming year.
Even then, we’re still not in the clear. On September 1, 2024, Pluto crosses briefly back into Capricorn a second time. That will only be a quick goodbye kiss – just forty days later, it enters Aquarius solidly. After that, it won’t be finished with Aquarius until early 2044 – and it won’t touch Capricorn again until February 28, 2254.
Complicated? Yes indeed – and that complexity will be echoed in the headlines, not to mention in your own head.
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The Covid pandemic changed everyone and everything. Who can doubt the idea that as years go by, memory will turn the pandemic into one of those “January 1, 1 A.D.” kinds of dates – pivot-points in history, like the birth of social media or Beatlemania. I never caught Covid myself, but I’m no exception when it comes to my life being “pivoted” by it – for one thing, pre-Covid, I was on the road non-stop for forty years. It’s a crazy way to live. After Covid, my passport has cobwebs forming on it and the Transportation Security Agency has barely crossed my natural boundaries in three years.
The roots of these changes in my lifestyle actually go back a little further than Covid. Late in the previous decade I saw Pluto and Saturn bearing down on conjunctions with my Sun, plus the progressed Moon about to enter my 12th house. Many astrologers would have suggested that Fear might have been my best strategy, but that’s not how I live with the planets – I feel that they’re up there to guide me, not to scare me. I saw that to head off danger, I needed to make some changes. I was turning seventy. Maybe it was time to travel less. The planets asked me that question – I answered it in my own way with a big Yes.
At that time I had half a dozen apprenticeship programs going around the world, each one meeting once or twice per year. I took those responsibilities seriously, so I gave a couple years’ notice on ending them. Around the same time, with Catie Cadge and Jeff Parrett, I began to lay the groundwork for my online school – the Forrest Center for Evolutionary Astrology. In January 2020, I did my last public program before the Plague struck – it was a synastry class in Palm Springs, California. We had over a hundred people signed up – and something like thirty of them dropped out, many citing “the flu.” That was my first inkling of what was to come.
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It was November 1966. I was sweet seventeen and lying in bed recovering from a tonsillectomy. Transiting Neptune was one degree from my Ascendant. One effect of that transit was that I’d just had my first and only experience of knock-out anesthesia. Another far more important one was that I was about to discover serious astrology.
As I lay there in my bed nursing my sore throat, my Scorpio mom came in and asked me if she could get me a book to read. I asked her for an astrology book. I think she was a little surprised, but she didn’t have a problem with that – I was blessed with an open-minded family. A couple hours later, she returned with a paperback. It was silly Sun Sign astrology aimed at the sorts of teenagers who weren’t destined for careers in rocket science. I won’t name the book because I try to avoid blaspheming against other astrological authors, but it was truly terrible. I devoured it anyway. I could tell that there was something real going on behind the obvious pandering and stupidity. If I were a fish, I’d have been toying with the worm, not quite sure if I was actually going to chomp down on it.
In for a penny, in for a pound – I finished that book and asked my mom for another one. This time she picked a winner. She brought me one of the dozen or so books that have actually changed the direction of my life. It was called Write Your Own Horoscope. The author was one Joseph F. Goodavage. I never hear anyone refer to it today – as a contribution to the astrological vocabulary, it’s mostly forgotten even though it was actually the first astrology book to sell over a million copies.
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Mark your calendars – on March 7, Saturn crosses the Pisces frontier. It will remain there until it enters Aries on May 24, 2025 – but then it will cross back into Pisces on September 1, 2025, not finally fully committing itself to Aries until February 13, 2026. That’s nearly three years in total, and Saturn’s passage will leave fingerprints on the headlines – and on your life too.
What will it mean? That’s not really up to Saturn, it’s up to you. There are ways to be in harmony with this energy and ways to get into trouble with it too. All that is what I want to explore with you in this newsletter.
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