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For my teaching programs, 2017 brings a “new year” of a different sort too. This month, on January 10, the Apprenticeship Program completes exactly one cycle of the lunar nodes. On that day, the Moon’s north node returns to 5° 35' Virgo – exactly where it was when the whole thing got started.
Reasonable people would give me blank looks and cross the street if I stood on a corner shouting, “A nodal return, a nodal return!” But for anyone who has studied the basic methodology of evolutionary astrology, we understand that the lunar nodes are about as central to the system as your third lumbar vertebra is to your back. We could not do evolutionary astrology without them.
Santa Claus is being good to me this year. I am getting a gift that I have wanted for a very long time – my fourth book, The Night Speaks, which has been unavailable for many years, is coming out again in a revised, updated edition. I am delighted to see it in print again.
Much of my writing over the years has been aimed at people who wanted to learn astrology. The Night Speaks serves that community, but even more, it is a book about why to do astrology – and, perhaps at an even deeper level, why to believe in it. It is, in other words, a book for anyone with an open mind and a mild interest in astrological possibilities. I think it also would make a fine, if somewhat subversive, gift for anyone who loves an astrologer, but who has not the foggiest idea what he or she thinks or does.
Know anyone getting close to having a baby? Anyone due in November? She might be carrying a saint in her womb. That’s my prediction: that we’ve got a good crop of fresh saints about to appear on the earth, right when we desperately need a few of them.
Saints are like that. They always appear on schedule.
“Saint” is, I admit, a dramatic word to use. It conjures up images of ethereal beings gazing up into heaven with never an impure or unworthy thought in their haloed heads. But I am not using the word that way. I am talking about flesh and blood saints, with attitudes, genitals, and personalities.
Drama reigns in the skies lately, with the long series of exact Pluto-Uranus squares looming from 2012 through 2015. As I write these words here on September 3rd, the major astrological event of the next few weeks is the upcoming Pluto Station on September 16 as it turns Direct at just under 5° Capricorn. In broad terms, when a planet is retrograde it tends to be inward and reflective. When it turns around to go forward, it becomes more assertive and oriented toward material experience. And when a planet is Stationary, it is extremely focused and intense. The tide is turning. With Pluto, this intensification naturally means either the culmination of some deep psychological work – or the emergence of catastrophic situations that illustrate the consequences of the lack of such work!
