Aries: You’re the equivalent of a quantum physics pioneer. The requirements of living in conventional time and space make you both agitated and bored. An awful clash of extremes. You continue to morph into the poster child for all things Uranian, meaning: If it’s wild and untried, you want to help usher in the ‘shock of the new’, regardless the fallout or damage. You understand instinctively that disruption and revolution are OK. No death, no rebirth.

Taurus: You’ve got to shake your own tree to affirm your independence in 2014. The bull must engage now! There’s a reason sloth is considered a misguided passion; it robs you of the desire to create, express and touch the world with beauty. Your inspirational output is connected directly to your sense of autonomy and freedom in 2014. You’ve been incubating a backlog of plans and surprises throughout 2013, and come June you’ll be ready to for the big reveal.

Gemini: Money is freedom. Better yet, having money means you don’t have to think about money. The caveat? Stop equating being poor with being unfettered. Money begets freedom and vice versa. Is there a magic money solution for you this year? Yes! Evaluate carefully your goldmine of friends and professional contacts. And then network and recruit like crazy come the spring. You’ll find the support you need and the money that follows.

Cancer: The dynamic Jupiter Pluto opposition this spring highlights sharp angles in your horoscope: Your identity, partner and career. Each particular is up for ruthless re-examination. The keywords for this transit are: Bigger, deeper and stronger. So extremes actually become you in 2014. This means amplifying your presence in ways you haven’t before. Say yes to everything. Hire a PR agent. Save the world! It’s the only way to cope with so much cosmic pressure.

Leo: The first half of 2014 finds you receiving transmissions from other realms. This sounds wonderfully unconventional, but it’s actually a realistic necessity — an important development in your process of ‘you’. This means exploring ways of thinking that minimize control and optimize faith. This is the year you discover that you aren’t the only lion in the jungle and that ‘higher powers’ really do exist. Take up a spiritual or philosophical practice that reinforces this insight and creates a foundation that is beyond time and space.

Virgo: A casual approach to romance isn’t going to cut it for you this spring. In other words hookups are out; as are sketchy schemes that don’t meet your high standards and quality control. But you knew all of this already. You’ve been on an unrelenting search for a partner or creative project that mirrors your newfound lust for life. Pay attention to your heart, everything you need to understand related to passion will arise through your feelings – not thinking. Note the distinction, it’s a crucial demarcation.

Libra: Each of the cardinal signs, of which you are one, are conduits for the ongoing Uranus Pluto clash. We’re looking to you to solve the riddle: “How to thrive when everything around me is collapsing?” The only sign that is not an animal or person, Libra has uncanny insights into the art of distancing and remaining objective and, well, balanced, regardless the mishegas. You instinctively sense that what’s unraveling is part of a larger pattern and movement – and you’re going to show each of us how to discover harmony amidst the discord.

Scorpio:: If you’re not working on a book that explains the ‘all and everything’ of existence, then, well, you are wasting precious time. Get on with it! You’ve upturned every rock in your backyard, studied the contents of those dark underworlds – and so – now what? Come March you must engage and commit to an active path that brings healing and rejuvenation. You’re all about re-creation and the ability to remain optimistic amidst the dimming of the light. Why? Because you know, instinctively, that a new dawn is just moments away. Yay!

Sagittarius: No other sign can conflate the notion of a divine plan with that of day-to-day existence as effortlessly as a centaur. And yet, what happens when doubt rears its head? You rewrite the script. You discover new moves that aren’t in your repertoire. The point? The first half of 2014 involves pushing beyond what you have taken for granted, namely your ‘always on’ optimism. Now you need to confirm your faith in very pragmatic ways, through work, love and newfound vision. Quite the koan.

Capricorn: Mars, the planet that dares you to win, forces closure to an awkward situation at home at the start of 2014. It’s a simple equation for the rest of the year: You can’t move forward until you’ve buried the past. Gain new ground by investing in a plan that involves partnership and cooperation. You can’t go it alone this year. Break free from your old mode of relating – it’s a requirement. But, good times and renewed vigor await those who dare to share. So do the later.

Aquarius: Get specific with your financial and vocational goals. Stop waiting for the perfect situation to fall into your lap. Ain’t gonna happen. Optimization comes when you pay attention to simple, step-by-step solutions, especially solutions that impact your health. You’ve got to move down from your head and align with forces that are earthbound. All of your charismatic ideas and inventions can’t take root without an anchored relationship to reality. Consider 2014 to be your wake-up call. Get ready for your close-up.

Pisces: The need to take on more commitments or obligations than you can handle is actually the universe’s way of confirming that you’re sitting on a wellspring of creative energy. But now the big riddle: What exactly do you want to create? You’ll need to define and finalize a choice come the early spring when your ruler, Jupiter, begins to move forward, out of its current retrograde phase. What felt like restraint turns out to have been a long process of refinement. And that’s a keyword you like very much, yes?

I’ve been waylaid by an aggressive flu, so plans for the site — some ‘best of lists’ and a music mix of highlights from 2013 — went amiss. Sorry about that.

But I do want to talk a bit about the fervor that’s building as we enter another new year. Many astrologers are declaring that this won’t be just any new year; no — this will be 2014. The year that commences with a New Moon exactly conjunct Pluto. The year that will frame the acutest of the ongoing Uranus Pluto squares. The year when the United States’ birth chart is severely PMS-ed by a grand square involving its Saturn and Pluto of origin (intermixed with the aforementioned Uranus Pluto square).

The Cassandra squawking just won’t stop. Which, to me, in my usual way of thinking about predictions, indicates that reality, being the slippery experience that it always is, won’t deliver the horror show everyone is expecting or perhaps hoping for. (There’s nothing like a full blown disaster to clear the decks and start things afresh).

As I’ve written many times throughout this site, astrology proves a disaster when it comes to predictive accuracy. And mundane astrology, the astrology of groups, nations and world events, has a particularly horrible predictive record.

I much prefer the work and style of astrology that an astrologer like Jessica Murray has mastered, where predictions are forgone in the presence of intelligent, in-depth inquiry into the present and what animates the present, which would be human presence. Because at the end of the End of Days, after we’ve read the last goofy bit of babble about upcoming ‘changes’ and ‘challenges’ and ‘transformations’ (terms that recycle through astro blogging like a virus), we are still left alone with our silly selves, unmoved, untouched because an event as profound as an actual ‘transformation’ involves working with a level of consciousness that is beyond our pea-brain capacities. As Gurdjieff repeated often, “Man can not do.” So until one does, all of the other noise is a distraction.

Read more

This post comes via a suggestion from astrologer Sherrye Weinstein, and I’d like to thank her off the top for it.

I’d posted a request for article ideas over on Facebook today and Sherrye suggested an inquiry into the peculiar — and rather long — transits of Venus in Capricorn and Mars in Libra. Venus will move through the sign Capricorn until early March 2014; and Mars will transit Libra, beginning tomorrow, until the end of July 2014. That is a long Mars transit, and in a sign that, conventionally, Mars is muddled in. Not to mention Venus’s FAIL in Capricorn.

Without launching into a diatribe against the too-tight limitations traditional astrology applies to interpretation (with its rulerships, laws, dignities, falls and train wrecks), I want to focus more on the fascinating possibilities that exist for each of us while the planet of love traverses the sign of structure and limitation — Capricorn (where Mars is exalted and runs free — bastard!).

As you’ll see, I’m not negating our heritage from traditional astrology, but I’m amplifying the various paradoxes in a way that fit a modern logos, one imbued with the merits of psychological understanding. Having said that, it’s interesting to remember that Saturn, Capricorn’s ruler is exalted in Libra, a Venusian sign — and that offers a cogent clue here. We’ve a bit of a cluster fuck with these transits, and it’s fun to untangle the various limbs and gender parts, to find the goose that lays the golden egg (I think I mixed metaphors, yes?) Read more

It’s long been a tacit secret that Margaret Mitchell used the 12 signs of the zodiac to define and imbue her characters in Gone With The Wind.

UK astrologer Neil Spencer describes Mitchell as having based her epic “on the zodiac, leaving a blatant trail of clues which were only picked up in 1978 when US astrologer Darrell Martinie was shown photocopies of notes from Mitchell’s library.”

You can do the celestial math. Scarlett O’Hara, is an impetuous, selfish but ultimately heroic Aries. Rhett Butler, a passionate and proud but principled (when need be) Leo. Sister-in-law Melanie Hamilton, a self-sacrificing Virgo. I’ve often wondered what sign Prissy (“I don’t know nothing about birthin’ babies”) might have been based upon. Maybe a hysterical Pisces or Sagittarius?

Where only speculation surrounded Mitchell’s masterpiece, we now have a Man Booker Prize winner — Eleanor Catton and her second novel The Luminaries (what a stellar title!) — pushing its way into the world of popular literature. Catton has talked openly about the astrological motif (and its influence) that enlivens her prize-winning fictional work. In an interview with PBS’ Jeffrey Brown she notes:

“In my research for the book, I discovered, to my interest and astonishment, that astrology really is an incredibly mathematical system and one that has a lot in common with music. In music, we have got the 12 semitones and then the seven natural notes in the scale.

And in astrology, you have got the 12 signs and the seven planets. A lot of the kind of interrelations that happen and the harmonies that happen in the sky are quite similar to the harmonies that can happen or the chords that can happen in music.”

Good for her! No mention of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.

Rather than spend time sharing my impressions of the theme and the charming author you can watch the interview here.

And order a copy from Amazon. (I just placed my order tonight, and can’t wait!)

Enjoy!

My friend David Roell runs a real brick and mortar bookshop in Maryland. It is one of the best annexes around for all things astrological. He just notified me that his bookstore’s shipment of Jim Maynard‘s Celestial Guide calendars have arrived and that it’s time for you to order yours now.

Please consider purchasing your calendar from an astrologer and an astrology bookshop as it goes a long way in keeping a business like David’s Astrology Center of America available to all of us. David has an incredibly comprehensive collection of books and we want to keep him and his business around for a long time.

About the calendars, David offered this fascinating observation:

“Give one to a child who wants to learn the craft. Have him/her learn to use the voids as a guide to daily activities. Train him to sense the Moon’s transit through the various signs, give him practical advice from Mercury retrograde, etc.

From what I’ve worked out, astrology shows the Earth’s daily temperature, in other words the Earth’s unique ever-changing vibration as it continuously relates to the Sun, Moon and other planets. Astrology does not rain from an empty sky. It radiates from the earth itself . You should no more ignore the daily ephemeris than you should go out of doors without regard to the weather. Astrology describes the raw energies of this planet, our home, nothing more and nothing less. That’s what Maynard has given us, on a daily basis and set in our own proper time for easy reference.”

Astro Web Destinations

Two of my favorite astrology websites that I want to note for you this month are both published by women and they both offer unique insights into the ongoing dialogue between you and me and the solar system. I prefer sites like this where you develop a distinct sense of the author’s character and proclivities; a kind of approachability that tempers astrology’s intimidating complexities. This brings astrology down to earth and makes it accessible without involving Sun sign banter or romance advice (not that I’ve anything against that sort of astrology).

A good example of what I’m talking about is Wonder Bright‘s Stars of Wonder.

Wonder’s prose is akin to sitting down with a friend over a cup of coffee and moving through a myriad of topics both celestial and terrestrial. Her first-person retellings generate an inviting aperture on the astrological matrix.

I particularly enjoyed her recent rumination on the Twilight series of movies, the story’s heroine Bella, and how our culture has become so distanced from a healthy connection to the feminine we’ve had to devise a way back to her essence through the supernatural realm. Highly recommended.

My friend and art colleague Kate Petty publishes Ambient Astrology, a beautiful respite and reminder that astrology websites don’t have to resemble a carnival attraction to hold your attention.

Kate’s fierce interest in some of astrology’s more esoteric and complex modalities, namely the school of Symmetrical Astrology (the bug of which bit me hard when I met up with one of its kingpins, Gary Christen, at the recent NORWAC astrology convention in Seattle) and employing antiscia when studying the various markers of the horoscope, underlie many of her articles.

Kate’s most recent post, Reclaiming the Apocalypse, will give you pause when you consider the intense, unprecedented array of exact planetary aspects we’ll experience through the remainder of November. Spend time with this piece and you’ll come away with a new way of considering what living through a cycle’s final throes implies. It’s both thrilling and unnerving, but we wouldn’t be here to usher in this new phase if we weren’t gifted with the substance of soul to persevere.

Have a site you think I should know about? Please share your comments below. I’m all ears (and eyes).