Hello, and welcome to our newsletter. We're closing in on the winter solstice, with shorter days and longer nights, and the desert nights are more clear and starry than ever.
As we've mentioned here before, we are 3/5ths of the way through a pattern of five oppositions of Saturn and Uranus:
* on 11/04/08 at 19 Virgo (Saturn) -Pisces (Uranus)
* on 2/5/09 at 20 Virgo-Pisces
* on 09/15/09 at 25 Virgo-Pisces
* on 4/24/2010 at 29 Virgo-Pisces
* on 7/26/2010 at 1 Libra-Capricorn
Pluto’s recent demotion to the status of “dwarf planet” upset a lot of us It shouldn’t. We astrologers have been calling the Sun and Moon “planets” for a long time. We have, in other words, a long tradition of using the term “planet” differently than astronomers do. Experience has taught us that Pluto simply works like one—we know it’s a “planet” and we really don’t need anyone’s approval before we use the term.
Uranus Transiting the First House
Get ready for a tremendous burst of individuation. Who we really are is in conflict with our biographical reality. The psyche demands resolution of this schism, and the resolution is typically quite dramatic. It involves conflict with figures of authority, major restructuring of relationships, and a lot of existential chaos.
Hello, and welcome to our September 2009 newsletter. Can you believe it's September already? I'm back from speaking at the ISAR conference in Chicago in late August. My lecture was well received, and I was glad to see some of you there.
The planets are fittingly busy in solar Virgo, the sign of personal growth, wholeness, and craftsmanship:
1. Transiting Mercury is retrograde from Sept. 6-29, from 6 Libra back to 22 Virgo. For those of you new to astrology, Mercury rules communication of all kinds, learning, teaching, details, transportation, commerce, and devices we use to work with anything Mercury rules. It also rules how your mind works, what you notice, how you process information. When Mercury is retrograde, that which it rules tends to go "backwards." It's a good idea to double check all details, get tracking numbers, etc. It's also wise to review information or edit material rather than act upon it or begin a Mercury-ruled project.
2. There is an transiting Saturn-Uranus partile (exact) opposition on the 15th at 25 Virgo (Saturn) - Pisces (Uranus). We are in a pattern of five oppositions of these planets:
*on 11/04/08 at 19 Virgo (Saturn) -Pisces (Uranus)
* on 2/5/09 at 20 Virgo-Pisces
*the one mentioned above, on 09/15/09 at 25 Virgo-Pisces
*on 4/24/2010 at 29 Virgo-Pisces
* on 7/26/2010 at 1 Libra-Capricorn
An excerpt from Yesterday's Sky Chapter 5
If you are a nerd, welcome to paradise. If you slept through science, but were wide-eyed when English class turned to the Romantic poets, you will probably make a very fine astrologer—but you might want to skip this chapter.
So, what exactly are the nodes of the Moon? Obviously, they are not planets. Since they are the foundation of Evolutionary Astrology and the gateway into karmic analysis, let’s take a little while to understand them rigorously.
Earth orbits the Sun, but since we are sitting on the Earth, it doesn’t look that way. For millennia, our ancestors assumed it was the other way around—that the Sun orbited the Earth. Since astrology is Earth-centered, we stick with that visual illusion in our language and perspective. What we actually see is that the Sun circuits the same band of constellations each year. Astrologers call that band the Zodiac. Astronomers call it the Ecliptic.