The fact is, it’s pretty fringe stuff at best and astrologers would do well to rethink where it came from, where they’re really going with it, and how to bring it into the fold of a reasonable natural view of things. Of course, we all know that the signs are just twelve 30-degree segments of the ecliptic starting at the vernal equinox. And we know that they got labeled with names of constellations they roughly coincided with several thousand years ago made up by cultures that no longer exist. They didn’t apply well back then, as not every ancient culture back then agreed on the animals or mythological entities the constellations suggested, and disparate world cultures completely disagree about them now. So, they are not only useless, they just confuse things.

Various half-hearted attempts have been made to change names one at a time – like changing Cancer to Moon-Child to better reflect its apparent qualities – but to no avail. These aren’t ultimately animals, people, gods, or anything else cute or anthropomorphic – they’re divisions of the seasons of the year and as such may at best share some qualities thereof. Thus, you might better call them early, middle, and late spring, early, middle, and late summer, and so on. Certainly the summer signs seem to be “warmer” than the winter ones – ruled by Moon (Cancer), Sun (Leo), and Mercury (Virgo) as opposed to Saturn (Capricorn), Uranus (Aquarius), and Neptune (Pisces). Of course, that’s only for the Northern Hemisphere – but Aussie and Kiwi starcasters will tell you they don’t reverse down-under, so maybe it’s a set of world seasons at best. Perhaps not seasons at all, just projected segments of our orbit.

If you want to get all scientific about it, you’ll find a lot more support for tangible differences in seasonal births ranging from disease susceptibility to professional predilection and success than you will for Sun signs. But that only applies when you’re talking about where the Sun is. In real astrology the terms should also apply to planets as well: Jupiter at 15 degrees “mid-autumn” (15 Scorpio) or Mars at 23 “early spring” (23 Aries). Really, you might be better off just numbering them 1-12, so the above would appear as 15-8 and 23-1, but that would have about as much appeal as the metric system – and no doubt Europeans and Americans would insist on using them in different order like they do months and days, so we would probably get even more confusion from it. Yet, the next step of simply using degrees 1-360 (as one does when calculating midpoints) would eliminate the sign factor entirely, and we know signs do have real qualities and need to be considered.

What to do? Since several generations of pop Sun-sign astrology has got even the worst skeptics knowing their signs, probably we’re stuck with what we’ve got (if the Vedic folks will just come around to it). And perhaps it will be a lesson in interpretive humility to have to remember that the animals and demigods don’t quite fit – early summer doesn’t walk sideways and late summer isn’t always so virginal, and that late fall creature with six limbs, well, don’t even ask. We could use the humility, because we don’t yet even know why the segments of the earth’s tilted attitude, regardless of what season they might represent in one hemisphere or another, should qualitatively affect anything that passes through them at all. We just notice that they do – maybe when we find out why that is, we’ll come up with a more appropriate set of labels for the phenomena.

More detail on the subject at Zodiac Signs: Foreground or Background?…

By happenstance, most of my friends on Facebook happen to be musicians, not astrologers, but here’s something musical that connects. First, rhythm and harmony. Did you know that if you take two beats, like one at 60 beats-per-minute (bpm) and another at 80 bpm, basically a 3 against 4 syncopation, and double it (like you would octaves) until it rises into the tonal range, you get a perfect fifth? Other common beat combinations create harmonies as well. And if you raise the frequency/wavelength all the way up until the single octave of visible light, something similar happens. Proportions that sound good lower down look good higher up. If you do the opposite, and start halving frequencies to way down below bpm all the way to beats per day, month, or year, or century, you get the frequencies of the earth’s rotation and planetary revolutions, all of which tug on us en masse in exactly the same set of proportions. It’s like the rhythm of the planets’ push and pull are the deep, bass and rhythm track of our entire existence, echoed in ever higher sets as we reach sound and finally light. Although we seem to perceive and experience each set separately, they are all integrally part of the same stack, like nested matryoshka dolls.

Further, in each separately-perceived set, we assign the same qualities to that particular spectrum. Slow rhythms and deep tones feel more worrisome and ominous, fast and high seem more playful and less threatening. The same goes for colors, with the lower-frequency red end more hostile and threatening, the higher blue and violet happier and lighter in tone. And way down below, as any astrologer can tell you, it’s the slow, long-period outer planets that are the darker movers of difficulties (like Saturn on out), and the faster ones more positive, uplifting, and accessible (from Jupiter inward).

If there is any “physical basis” to astrology, it is the gravitational entrainment of Earth itself and our environmental rhythms that we then experience as individuals – not a direct link from above to any one of us, but from below and around, up through our feet and in from all around us, keeping us in tune (if we let it) or fighting it (if we insist on not listening).

And that’s where we could apply what we learn from music and art. In music, we deliberately attempt to let the music entrain us, to carry us along, to sing in tune with the song and let it uplift us. We are consciously aware of doing this, and it is what makes music and art intentionally unifying. Here, we knowingly seek to be entrained, to get in tune with the tune so we enjoy it. If we paid a bit more attention to those lower, deep bass rhythms that describe the larger picture (and us inside it), we might be better off, better in tune. That’s particularly important, because unlike music, it’s not a real choice for us. If you don’t like the rhythms of the planets (and Earth), you can’t change stations, switch your playlist, and try another song. We’re stuck with the cosmic music that’s currently on tap, and if we want a better experience in life, there is no real choice but to go with the flow. That’s what real astrology (not the newspaper Sun-sign variety) is all about, so it’s worth a second look for everyone…When you know the dance, you can join it, even lead it. If you fight the beat, you’re a lot more likely to get beaten back, without ever knowing why. So look up, listen in, and join the band…

For more details on this, see both Windowpanes and Many Rainbows…   

Speculation is all the rage among astrologers as the great shootout in the sky is about to commence this summer, marking the last opposition of Saturn and Uranus (begun on American election day 2008) swelled by the mutual square to Pluto in Capricorn and conjunction of Jupiter to Uranus just entering Aries. By August 7, it will be a monster cardinal grand cross with Venus, Mars, and the Moon all joining Saturn in Libra. It does look rather horrendous, and of late has even the usually droll Michael Lutin freaking out with metaphors he previously avoided.

So what is so special, that makes this more than just another middle and outer planetary tangle? The usual glance rearward at planetary cycles helps. The Jupiter/Uranus synodic cycle is only about fourteen years – but the planets’ tight orbital resonance of 7:1 (seven orbits of Jupiter equals one of Uranus) puts them back together entering the same sign, in the same year, every 84 years, taking 400 years (and five joint entries) to move it along a sign. In recent history they’ve been jumping into Gemini and Leo together as well, but when that sign is Aries, the result is really aggressive and you tend to notice it a lot. The last three times were 1762, 1845, and 1927. Now this, and then again in 2094.

1762 was perhaps the most special, as it was marked by Saturn added to the conjunction, modifying the sometimes explosive and uncontrolled expansion this combination otherwise engenders. It also was followed by the only grand trine of the outer planets in modern history, and with it the writings and movements marking what was to be the Enlightenment founding of modern democratic government in the West. Original ideas and ways of thinking that were perfectly in tune to grow through the ages were born forcefully but gracefully, though it would take a series of revolutions, political, social, and scientific, to finally bring it all into place.

1845 was nowhere near so controlled an expression. Right after Jupiter hit Uranus, it went on to hit Pluto, and following that, Uranus itself moved to hit Pluto, in America marking the Mexican War and huge, uncontrolled expansion into Texas and California, the Gold Rush, and the intractable issues defining the Civil War. In Europe the destabilizing Irish famine followed, and after that the great revolutionary uprisings of the late 1840s in nearly every country in Europe.

1927 was even worse. The explosive new idea that hit society was national socialism and “socialist” dictatorship solutions to a failing world economy. That year, in Germany the speaking ban on Hitler was lifted, in Italy fascist extremists were “normalized” by Mussolini, and in the Soviet Union moderate Trotsky was expelled as Stalin seized power. And, with Saturn opposite the bowl of the outer planets in a grand trine with Neptune and Uranus, appealingly convenient evil was an easy sell, meeting little resistance on earth or above for some years after, at great price. 

Socially and politically, what seems to make the difference between a positive/creative and negative/destructive outcome of this explosive, expansive, instant-action conjunction is its contemporary and follow-up contexts. The one we’re going into is dreadful while it’s happening, being part of a huge T-square and series of grand crosses. But most of that passes almost immediately after this summer’s blowup, as Saturn flees and dutifully tucks itself inside the bowl of the outer planets, a reliable but overlooked indicator of stabilizing government, crisis resolution, and social progress.

So this time the chances are, on the world stage at least, we may get off with a near-miss and recovery after some explosive confrontations that could actually lead to better (though perhaps bitter) solutions. How each of our lives is affected by this rough ride is another matter, but there’s already a really good book out on that subject. By Scots astrologer Anne Whitaker, it’s called, not surprisingly, Jupiter Meets Uranus. So, go read it…

One of the obviously wonderful things computers have done for astrology is to enable us to cast a lot of charts for every conceivable moment, speeding our learning process as we compare hundreds of charts with their owners (natal) or moments (horary and events) and see what patterns emerge. It wasn’t so long ago that it took poring over ephemerides and house tables, adding up columns of adjustments for longitude, sidereal time, elapsed time, and lots more just to get a single handwritten chart. But the advantage was, of course, you had to learn all about planetary speeds and motions in the process, the critical groundwork too many astrologers these days do without.

But what the computer takes away in that respect, it gives back double, because you can now also animate the sky and watch all those relative movements of faster and slower planets cross and pass each other, forming evolving patterns like the fingers of a giant hand flexing itself across the sky. You can do it at any time frame – from the expansions and contractions of a single month or year to the broad outer planetary patters of the ages. I do it with one of the features of Matrix’s Winstar (or earlier, Winstar Express), but I suppose there are other programs that do it as well.

The evolution of 2010 is actually one of the more picturesque years to look at, as we’re watching the giant T-square of Saturn opposite Uranus square Pluto in its final stages before it breaks up at the end of the year, with Jupiter and Mars joining the fray in the middle and the rest of the planets filling out the rest, with some dramatic lockups in late spring and late summer. You can see the whole thing as a video here (best download it right off for later replay, as it’s a 14meg file, a bit time-consuming to bring up every time), and it’s worth a look. The year rolls through almost all of the classic “Jones patterns” (except for a true bundle) starting out as an opposing-fingers see-saw in winter, expanding into a wide-open palm with spread fingers by late spring, and then as the fall wears on gradually withdraws well inside a single hemisphere until it’s almost a clenched fist by the New Year. It’s like a continual set of celestial mudras, the hand of Brahma outstretched and communicating abstract visions to the rest of us here below, whose fortunes open and close accordingly, with each new nativity carrying its own metaphorical message to which an entire life will be devoted, like each of our own…

Superbowl Update: Only a few days later, yet another hilarious Mars retro manifestation. A blitz of blatantly hostile, intentionally sexist, “I’ve-lost-my-manhood” commercials dominated the usually-amusing advertising. Get over it guys, don’t get so bent out of shape — Mars retro won’t last forever…

“Do you hear what I hear?” With due respect to the Christmas spirit and the evergreen 1963 Bing Crosby chart topper, perhaps not. Listening to the same song, we all hear approximately the same set of sound waves, and we similarly recognize the song in general, but we each bring our own memories, musical experience, and personal implications that may differ considerably. For a professional musician, it’s a package of harmonies and rhythms, to a minister it’s an expression of inner beliefs, to a last-minute shopper it’s background to a holiday bargain.

But regardless of profession, religion, or listening context, the chances are we will recognize it within a few seconds and adjust our inner version accordingly. A few notes, a couple of beats, and you know what it is. This sort of pattern recognition, large inferences derived from small, limited fragments of information, is an essential talent of sentient beings in general. You can’t survive without it. Most of your daily life is run by snap judgments based on quick and often subconsciously-processed details and assumptions.

And, as an astrologer, it’s the basis of your art. When you look at a planet, in a specific sign, in an individual house, aspected by something else in the chart, you bring to bear both consciously and unconsciously all the things you’ve ever read about any of those factors. Bits and pieces of all the astrological cookbooks you’ve read instantly process, sort, and weigh in, along with the personal experience you’ve had with those positions in the charts of friends, family, celebrity examples, and clients, not to mention your own horoscope. Further, if you’re giving a reading with any sort of mutual input (in person, on the phone, even email), all your natural personality-judging cues weigh in and tell you what to pay attention to and what to ignore in analyzing the person and the situation, well beyond the chart in front of you. Debunkers will claim that is all you really do (regardless of the chart), but you know the ability to combine it all, inclusively, is the sign of a real pro, in any profession.

You’re doing a lot of implying and inferring with every word you hear, every glance you make, and every cue you pick up, whether it’s live in real time or from your long, educated set of memories, and if you’re good, you know it, and weigh them all carefully and wisely. What you may not consider is that astrology itself is a set of inferences based on pattern recognition that calls up the subtlest of your animal talents. As we have mentioned before, the planetary positions and movements you are considering are in fact largely a set of slow and deep sub-bass lines in the music of life, and what you extrapolate from them in terms of daily likelihoods and personal behavior are dependent entirely on how well and how quickly you recognize the “song”. The planetary “frequencies” are long and low, taking days to centuries to reverberate, though diurnal movements shift from minute to minute. Yet, even that’s really slow, compared to the second-to-second toe-tapping beat of a song or the thousands of cycles a second involved in pitch, melody, and harmony. Yet you can, amazingly enough, sense or infer all of this when dealing with a chart and a client. Just by comparing the many time-scales of your own personal knowledge and experience (astrological and otherwise), you can come up with insights and information that amaze both yourself and your client. Your ability to judge and balance all of these levels determines how good an astrologer you are.

So, do you hear what I hear? In a well-tuned experience, from a chart reading to a casual hello, one should hope so, regardless of what we think we bring to it, because we bring more than we realize. That’s how we manage to play together, from infancy and childhood into old age. Astrologers, of all people, should be more aware of this, because in our best moments it’s our stock in trade.

While in a somewhat bah-humbug holiday mood I recently noted some of the (fortunately) few negative reviews of my composite chart book, which inevitably complained that it was too much a self-indulgent cookbook with second-person readings that said “you attract this” and “you behave like that” like some Sun-sign column or just another plug-in, online computer astrology report. I’ve read the same complaints about my Lunar Returns and even Planets In Love. And, you know, I couldn’t agree more. The important, individual essence of those books is covered in the introductory third of each (which most readers skip – sadly, as that’s the heart of it all) and the rest is, well, report text, as required by the publishers. [Of course, there is no reason you can’t learn plenty from that, about every individual sign, house, and aspect, if you just ignore that annoying second person subject.] But, interestingly, they’re all still in print, whereas one of the best books I ever wrote, Uranus, which had no such report-style section, became ancient history overnight. Go find a copy.

In the “old” days, before there was such a thing as a computer report (or much of a popular market for astrology), general astrology books put individual placement analysis in the third person – “such an aspect would indicate a person inclined to…etc., etc.” Much more formally didactic, but it didn’t sell very many books. In fact, it was only with the “Planets In” series that publishers began to adopt the now-universal computer report format (both to plug the text into commercial reports and to make it more personal to the new public who cared more about an individual read than actually studying astrology). That was 1977, and here we are today – with the emphasis still on the boring and self-centered. Please, tell me more about myself, do go on…

But it’s not just a publisher-consumer commercial conceit. Most of astrology is geared to learning about yourself, how you behave, your problems, how everything affects you, with the tacit presumption that you are really the center of the universe, and that knowing yourself is the key to knowing everything. Our encounters with science display the delusion as well. It’s why we keep looking for explanations of how the planets might affect us individually (so deftly thwarted by the inverse-square gravitation law) instead of looking at how they might explain the structure that surrounds us, so we can better understand how we fit into it. Even Western religion agrees, or has since the Reformation when we decided we could talk to God on a first-name basis, without any intercessors required. No more need for hosts of angels, saints, and ministers, you have a personal appointment with Jesus, and He’d better not be late. It’s been a very isolated, self-centered world-view for a long time, and astrology has kept right up with the times. Sad, because this “mother of sciences” used to involve, indeed require, a universal world picture – and it may yet again, as environmental consciousness begins to remind us that although we necessarily see life through our own individual windows, we’re not the center of the celestial city.

The “me generation” that started in the 1970s, but really got going with the “greed is good” 1980s followed by the “we own the world” 1990s, is still very much with us, epitomized by our current ruin in this past “decade from Hell,” and astrology has reflected it. It has all been about separation, illusory independence, and ultimately self-centeredness. It would appear that the “inner journey” so hopefully begun by the 1960s Pluto-in-Leo generation became mostly a trip into the mirror. Let’s hope the me-first edifice that is now crashing around us will be replaced with something more inclusive and substantial, especially in the world of astrology, the practice of which has become an all-too-true mirror of our manufactured illusions.

Sometimes it’s really frustrating to be putting out ideas before their time has come – worse than that, you often don’t get credit or profit (if at all) until it’s entirely too late. In my case, composite charts are a good example. I introduced them (in The Composite Chart: The Horoscope Of A Relationship, Weiser 1973) and despite my introduction to the contrary, Rob Hand’s subsequent and better-promoted book on them (Planets In Composite) got him all the credit, and the profit, for twenty years, until the definitive Composite Charts came out. Similarly with cycles, the general concept and the parts and pieces of which were around and discussed by the likes of Charles Jayne, Dane Rudhyar, and Grant Lewi. The next step – the idea of plotting cycles and their relations, intersections, and dynamics on graphs – was obvious and pinpoints times and events no other method can, and it was introduced in Astrological Cycles and the Life Crisis Periods and later Dynamic Astrology.  Thirty years later, there has still been no accessible computer program that does these, despite hundreds of requests and a couple of failed programming attempts on both sides of the Atlantic. I did it better on my Apple II back in 1979. What gives?

Similarly, the idea that planetary effects are part of a larger picture of similar proportions at all scales, with all phenomena, large and small, has been around since Classical times, even flourished briefly in the late Renaissance, and yet modern astrologers still fail to get their heads around it, to their continuing discredit. The temptation to sell astrology as some sort of instant amateur psychology (which it does well enough) or fortunetelling still obscures the larger picture. Sometimes I wonder what it takes to bring the obvious to the fore, when the stagnant present has no ears to listen or eyes to see.

When I was growing up in the 1950s, my dad pointed out on a globe how neatly Africa and the Americas fit together and said they must have been joined in the distant past. He was describing plate tectonics, which was still totally ahead of its time then (my dad got it from reading Alfred Wegoner in the 1920s), but it made sense to me, indeed it was obvious. And now, generations later, it’s finally gospel, far too late for Wegoner to benefit.

In similar vein, I often feel like a voice in the wilderness. The hows and whys of where astrology meets science (or just reality, how things work) are barely being debated while one side misses (or arrogantly denies) the legitimacy of the other. I see a lot of astrologers, and scientists, who don’t know better but who should, since they all claim to be seeking the truth of the matter, not fighting over control of some myopic, proprietary version of it. I also see a small core of both trained scientists and astrologers who are on the right trail, but are ignored or even ostracized for their views, when they express them, in their own communities. Not that I know where all the answers lie, but I can point, and it’s generally not where the rest of the world is pointing in the specific areas of science and astrology – though it’s often where world movements of eco-psychology and “theories of everything” are treading fearlessly, without every thinking to include astrology.

Go back and look at the signs, folks. It’s all of a piece, and planetary rhythms are integral reflections of the rest of the proportions of most scales large and small. They all resonate with, and within, each other – from the ages to the micro-moment, from mega-macro to mini-nano.  A little willingness to look outside of each profession’s own limitations would go a long way to remove those limitations and bring us to a united physical world view that includes physics, chemistry, evolutionary biology, and cosmology, with real planetary effects included. Since the 1960s, a period when hopeful uniters briefly flourished, the world has been at the mercy of dividers and deciders on a roll to separate and individuate the post-modern arts and sciences, in an individualistic and separatist illusion with dreadful political and economic results. It’s about time the pendulum came back the other way. When it does, we’ll see it’s all of a piece, and we’ll all get a bigger piece of it. I’ve seen (and often articulated) the vision, and I only hope I see it come to pass in time to benefit personally. Posthumous glory has little appeal to the living…those of my “certain age” understand it better than most, but it transcends generations, as only lengthy periods of ignorance (and, occasionally but briefly, wisdom) can…

In the speedy world of astro-blogs, where everyone has to have something to say every day about something – anything – astrological, I wonder how many writers are coming from newly-acquainted, instant-gratification space and how many from a lifelong, visionary dedication to the art. It would seem the former get most of the attention and the latter (who don’t publish so often) get the back seat, to the general degradation of the subject.

Some of us have travelled a long and too-undocumented road to get where we are, often hiding the visions that brought us here, for reasons of modesty or risk to other professional endeavors, and it’s time we spoke up, as it’s getting late in the game for this little progress. I’ve just done so in a tripartite, multimedia effort at www.astrococktail.com/astrologerstale.html and I hope it will encourage others to reveal how they got here as well. Go look, and listen. In my case, the path led through the 1960s experience of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, but done with extreme care and repeated analysis every step of the way. I achieved a lot then, more later, and there is yet more to be done while life still remains.

The issues of who we are, how it’s all put together, and what to do with it are still the first page on everyone’s book, but we still await something newly meaningful to say about it. Starting from a background in science, history, and the classics, I’ve had first-hand experience with strange phenomena ranging from reincarnation to spirits from the beyond and more, along with a career full of truly needy astrological clients looking for explanations of things they can’t quite put together, either. Now, with the wolf at too many doors and diminishing returns from our former, lesser options (across several generations), it might be a good idea to regroup and say what we have experienced about the immediacy of life – what we have learned, what we live and die with, and what’s next.

What are your hidden visions that you haven’t revealed, or didn’t pursue? What are you going to do about them before you waste the windows you were given and they slam shut? It’s not just an individual issue, it’s about agreement, consensus, and a way forward. It’s not all wasted — not yet — but too soon, if we don’t speak up… What say you?

The idea of the planets predicting the weather has been in general speculation since people notice both planets and weather, together. For a good history, see Kim Farnell’s excellent astrological weather article. But really, how does the above really influence the below here? According to the chaos theory butterfly concept, you shouldn’t be able to predict it, as there are too many variables. A breath of air here magnifies to a hurricane there – or more problematically, yet someplace, almost anyplace else.

But maybe scaling, as we’ve been discussing here and here, calls the shots. Perhaps it’s “invariable scaling”, as they put it in the latest lead article of New Scientist. It would appear that the larger global patterns of weather, at varying altitudes, may be totally in sync with the smaller ones, perhaps “down to scales smaller than a millimetre.”  Now that’s locked-in scaling, backed up by adaptations of  exponential “power laws” that are at least, well, mathematical. The implication that scaling from large to small, and from slow to fast, in whatever spatial or temporal dimension your are considering, is the same and very closely reflective should be good news to astrologers. Well, at least to astrologers who are willing to look at their art as a part of a universal principle, in which they are ad hoc experts at one particular part of multiple sets of scaling, specifically the frequency range of the planets’ orbits.

Other news that makes one take another look at how different sets of scaling are viewed from different perspectives of time and lifespan comes from robins. Like other animals that can see things we don’t (or have forgotten how to), it would appear they don’t just feel (or smell), but actually see magnetic lines to guide them. What we experience, at the scale of our lifetimes, is critical to the very structure of astrology, as astrology may be just a part of that higher structure principle. It would explain a lot, from mathematics, to music, to art, not to mention the weather…what we don’t fully see, yet, are the missed connections, the scales we experience but don’t connect, or the ones we don’t see at all…