Not the Monthly Post

An Astrological Interlude: Aries Ingress 2018

John Michael Greer166 Comments

This fourth Wednesday of the month would normally be an open post for readers’ questions, but I’ve been asked by quite a few people at this point to cast and delineate a chart for the 2018 Aries ingress, and this is as good a time as any.

Aries ingress? That’s the technical term for the beginning of the astrological year, the moment of the spring equinox when the Sun enters the zodiacal sign Aries. In what’s known as mundane astrology—the astrology of politics, which tracks the rise and fall of nations—the Aries ingress each year, cast for the exact longitude and latitude of the capital city of each nation, is one of the most essential tools. It’s not the only game in town, as we’ll see, but it gives a good working approximation of the political and social collective climate for some or all of the year to come.

Before we begin, it’s probably necessary to get a couple of things out of the way. Yes, I’ve heard of the precession of the equinoxes, and so has every other astrologer. Scientific materialists have it stuck in their heads that we don’t know about it and that it disproves astrology. Er, guys, where do you think all that talk about the Age of Aquarius comes from? The signs of the zodiac are not the same as the constellations; the signs are 30° wedges of the ecliptic (the line traced by the Sun against the backdrop of the stars over the course of the year). Those wedges got their names from the stars that used to be there in ancient Greek times, and have since moved on to other wedges.  It’s because scientific materialists don’t bother to learn such basic facts about astrology that astrologers by and large pay no attention to their spluttering.

Oh, and I also know that the earth moves around the sun, and not vice versa. So does every other astrologer. We cast charts centered on Earth because that’s where we and our clients live, and so the positions of planets relative to Earth (and in fact to specific longitudes and latitudes on the Earth’s surface) are the data that matter. If human beings ever settle Mars—I don’t expect this to happen, but it’s been discussed in detail in astrological circles—their astrologers will have to recalculate all the planetary positions from a Martian vantage point. Oh, and they’ll have to figure out what astrological influence the Earth has in a birth chart cast on Mars, the same way Earthly astrologers have worked out the influences of Uranus and Neptune, not to mention dwarf planets such as Ceres and Pluto. Yes, they’re working on Eris, Sedna, et al. right now.

I don’t use minor bodies such as Ceres and Pluto in my charts, by the way. Did you know that Ceres used to count as a planet, the same way Pluto did? The astrology of planetary discovery is a fascinating field, and has much to say about changes in human history on the grand scale. So does the astrology of planetary downgrading, by the way—from an astrological point of view, the discoveries of Ceres and Pluto weren’t accidental, and their respective redefinitions as minor bodies weren’t accidental either. We’ll get to that in a post shortly.

Okay, one other thing. Nobody knows what makes astrology work. It’s a feeble and pigheaded excuse for rationality to insist that an effect can’t happen if its cause isn’t known—and when a scientist says “There’s nothing that can cause that effect,” what he or she actually means, of course, is “we don’t know of anything that can cause that effect.”  In the kind of old-fashioned occult philosophy I favor, the working theory is that there’s a subtle something-or-other that seems to be related to biological life, which fills the solar system (at least), and in which planetary movements relative to the Sun, the Earth, the Moon, and the other planets set up complicated patterns of resonance that affect living things here on Earth. Is that true? Heck if I know, but it does seem to explain the observed phenomena tolerably well.

With that in mind, let’s proceed to the 2018 Aries ingress for Washington DC. As already noted, this kind of chart is a basic tool of mundane astrology. People have been casting ingress charts for national capitals since the national capitals of interest were Babylon and Nineveh, so we’ve got quite a rich body of analytical tools to go by.

Here’s the chart. For those of you who don’t know how to read an astrological chart, the circle in the center is the notional Earth, and the circle around the outside is the notional heavens. The lines dividing the space in between mark the dividing lines, or cusps, between the twelve houses, which are divisions of the sky as seen from a particular point on Earth. Each cusp position is marked on the zodiac. See the one over on the left side, 04° Cancer 52’? That’s the ascendant, the cusp of the first house, which represents the point on the ecliptic that’s rising over the eastern horizon at the moment of the spring equinox at Washington DC. See the one a little right of the top, with an arrow pointing to it, 13° Pisces 39’? That’s the midheaven, the cusp of the tenth house, which represents the point of the ecliptic that’s highest in the sky at that same moment. Remember these; they’re of central importance to this chart.

The ascendant of an ingress chart tells you, among other things, how long the influence of that equinox will last. Cancer is a cardinal sign—the signs of the zodiac are either cardinal, fixed, or mutable—and an ingress with a cardinal ascendant only has effect for three months. We’ll have to cast another chart for the summer solstice to tell what’s going to happen after that.

The ascendant and its ruler also tell you the condition of the people of a nation during the period for which the ingress applies. The Moon also has this role, but the zodiacal sign Cancer is ruled by the Moon, so she’s the one to watch either way.  The Moon in this chart is in Taurus, the sign of her exaltation; she’s also benefited by trine aspects (which are highly favorable) from Mars and Saturn, and isn’t afflicted either by position or by aspect. This predicts that for the next three months, things will go fairly well for people in the US.

The Moon is in the eleventh house, and in mundane astrology this house corresponds to the national legislature. Uranus, the planet of eccentricity, individuality, and radical change, is also in the eleventh house, and well dignified with a trine from Mars. One prediction this suggests is that during the next three months, Congress, to everyone’s surprise, will do something that actually benefits the American people. Uranus in the 11th predicts abrupt realignments, sudden and unexpected developments, a tendency for the legislature to veer off in unexpected directions. This time, that may actually work out to benefit people.

The midheaven and its ruler tell you the condition of the government during the period for which the ingress applies. The Sun also relates to this, but specifically denotes the head of state: in our country, the President, as distinct from the executive branch (the 10th house cusp and its ruler), the legislative branch (the 11th house cusp and its ruler), and the judicial branch (the 9th house cusp and its ruler). The Sun in any ingress chart has a fixed position in the zodiac—it’s because he’s at 0° Aries exactly that this is the Aries ingress, after all—but its house position and aspects vary. In this chart the Sun is in the tenth house, the strongest house in the chart, and this position predicts success and popularity for the president for the next three months.

One of the aspects to the Sun helps explain why.  Jupiter in the fifth house of speculation is in trine aspect to the Sun, suggesting that we’re going to see another round of speculative excess over the next three months; those are always popular while they’re going, no matter how bleak things get after the inevitable bust. The second house, which governs the national economy, also has Cancer on the cusp and is therefore ruled by the well-placed Moon. People tend to be happy with the government when their wallets are full and the economy is, however temporarily, going well. We can expect Trump to benefit from that in the months ahead.

There’s a fly in the ointment, though, and it’s the square aspect from Mars. Mars is in the sixth house, and in a mundane chart, the sixth house rules the military; Mars is the planet of war, and also rules the sixth house cusp. Mars is also conjunct the seventh house cusp. Mars in the seventh house is pretty reliably an omen of war; below the horizon in the sixth house, though, it’s something subtler. I see this as referring to the proxy wars the US is fighting all over the Middle East and in several other corners of the world just now. Those will continue, and may well heat up, over the three months just ahead. Mars square the Sun also traditionally predicts that the head of state will come in for plenty of criticism and condemnation, but this is hardly a surprise.

Notice that Aries, the sign on the cusp of the legislative 11th house, is ruled by Mars, and that Mars is trine both the planets in the 11th house, Uranus and the Moon. This suggests common ground between Congress and the Pentagon, and also between the Pentagon and the American people generally. One possible reading is that some significant military reform will be pushed through by Congress. The Sun-Mars square, though, suggests that disputes between Trump and Congress, and between Trump and the Pentagon, will be highlighted in the months ahead. Mars has more aspects than any other planet in the chart; military affairs will thus take up an inordinate amount of space in headlines in the months to come.

The executive branch in general, though, is riding high this spring. The midheaven, the cusp of the 10th house, is in Pisces, which is ruled by Neptune, and Neptune is closely conjunct the midheaven, occupying the strongest position in the chart. That’s a harbinger of trouble, though, because Neptune is among other things the planet of fantasy, delusion, and intoxication. Notice that it’s not in aspect to any other planet in the ingress chart. The implication here—no surprise to anybody who’s been watching US politics for any length of time—is that the core institutions of the executive branch are hopelessly detached from the reality of life in today’s America, and just as detached from the changing world outside US borders. That’s eventually going to become a huge problem, but for the next three months nothing will pop the bubble of illusion.

The biggest cloud on the horizon is represented by Saturn in the 7th house, conjunct the 7th house cusp, and ruling both the 7th and 8th house cusps. Saturn in the 7th house of foreign affairs predicts a major crisis pitting the US against at least one other nation. Because Mars isn’t directly involved, that crisis will stop short of war; because Mars is close by, conjunct the 7th cusp from below, the threat of war will never be far from anyone’s mind, and covert military operations and proxy warfare may well play a significant role in the struggle.

The major field of conflict, though, will be economic. The 8th house, which Saturn rules alongside the 7th, is the house of the national debt, especially debts the nation owes to the rest of the world, and it also rules trade deficits. That intransigent Saturn on the cusp of the 7th thus suggests that over the three months ahead, foreign holders of US debt will become increasingly unwilling to keep carrying the costs of our extravagant national deficits, and the trade wars that the Trump administration has launched with China and several other countries are likely to accelerate over the months to come.

Despite all the carefully coordinated shrieks of dismay coming from the mainstream media in the US and its inner circle of allies, this is likely to help the US economy and improve the condition of most Americans. It’s only in the ravings of stark staring economists, after all, that free trade policies benefit anyone but the well-to-do; in the real world, free trade policies cripple the economy by driving down wages, thus making it impossible for consumers to buy the goods and services they need and want, and thereby depressing the largest sector of the US (or any modern) economy. An end to economic globalization will mean that more goods and services for the US market will be produced in the US, that more wages will be paid to US workers, and that the consumer sector of the economy will receive a badly needed boost.

So that’s basically what we can expect in the three months to come: a generally successful period for Trump’s presidency, marred by loud public quarrels with Congress and the military; a major shift in Congress, out of which important new legislation comes, probably affecting the military; more giddy excess in the nation’s speculative markets; a turn away from economic globalism, leading to enduring tensions in international affairs, but driving a significant improvement in domestic economic conditions; and an executive branch increasingly lost in its own self-referential bubble, but not yet undone by that bad habit.

You’ll notice that this ingress chart doesn’t predict the kind of future that most people like to insist we’re going to get any day now. The end of the world has no place in it, nor do any of the various leaps of technology, or consciousness, or the other forms of twinkle dust with which so many would-be prophets like to entertain their listeners. Neither does the all-consuming economic crash that so many people on the doomward end of the blogosphere have been predicting with the maniacal regularity of broken cuckoo clocks for decades now.

For that matter, this chart doesn’t predict that Trump will suddenly sprout a short black mustache, overthrow the Constitution, and impose the fascist police state that so many of his opponents like to pretend they’re fighting; nor does it predict that he will be impeached, or thrown out by a military coup. Do such things happen from time to time in history? Sure, but they’re fairly rare, all things considered, and signaled well in advance by an assortment of historical and astrological indicators.

Such fantasies are colorful, and they’re comforting to those who find the ordinary realities of politics and history too humdrum for their tastes, but it’s not the job of mundane astrology to cater to such interests.  It’s the job of mundane astrology to give some degree of advance warning of the political and social climate in which politicians, not to mention the rest of us, will make the decisions that will shape our lives in the months to come. How well does it work? We’ll discuss that in three months.

166 Comments

  1. Was Ronald Reagan’s astrologer any good? Did his use of astrology have any noticable effects?

  2. If you subscribe to the Electric Universe theory, astrology makes a lot of physical sense because relative positions of planets would affect the electric circuit that is the Solar System. And if you compare them objectively, EU explains a lot more than the Standard Model which is continually failing to find evidence for required postulates like “Dark Matter”.

  3. Ahhh..astrology, something that I’m willing to devote my time studying, instead of criminal justice blah, but personally I follow Vedic or Jyotish astrology. On the side note, can you please give me your opinion about Jyotish? Anyhow, I’m interested in the upcoming transition to Aries. I heard Venus is there already and that doesn’t sit well with me, along with that stupid mercury retrograde. But to the topic of Trump, I can’t help the feeling that his chart may expose some major flaws about his character, being born right after a lunar eclipse or so I heard. I think you can tell Mr. Greer by my enthusiasm of this field that I’m a Scorpio of some sorts (which I am, sun Scorpio here).

  4. “Okay, one other thing. Nobody knows what makes astrology work.” As you know, I’m the sort of person who asks questions like that. However, I’ll only ask a more “practical” question:

    Suppose you now cast Aries ingress charts for Moscow and Beijing, and compare the three. What insights might you get on the global “balance of power”, and how it might play out over the next quarter? (It might be a good exercise to do with the major economic centers: New York, London, etc.)

  5. Interestingly enough, for Mexico Mars is in the 7th house. Perhaps something or other will happen in Mexico, and this will threaten to become a large enough conflict to involve the US? The Mexican government has made their displeasure with the current American government clear enough, but I’m not sure what would lead Mexico into a war, especially if it meant risking fighting the US. Anyone who know Mexican culture, politics, history, etc have thoughts on the matter?

  6. Can you please answer a possibly stupid question? A while back I read Steven Forrest’s The Inner Sky and noticed that, as here, the wedges on the pie chart you present above, representing houses, were not the same size. Here, the thing that is supposedly at the top of the sky is well off-center in the chart. Moreover, it was evident in the book that the sizes of the various houses varied substantially from one chart to the next. If they are all 30-degree wedges of sky, why are they so variable in size? Thanks in advance….

  7. Mr. Greer, do you know of any cases where this kind of chart was tested against past major events, to check to what degree astrological influences drove them, or even better, to perhaps provide some light on dubious questions in history?

    It would be interesting to know a list of historical events where planetary influence was an important factor.

  8. JMG – I wonder if the fly in the ointment regarding Mars, might be the recent appointment of John Bolton as national security adviser? By all accounts the man is a neocon who never met a war he didn’t like. He still thinks the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a good idea. Might he push Trump to heat up proxy wars? Even worse, might he push Trump to break off talks with North Korea over their nuclear program? Or even rip up the Iran nuclear deal, throwing more fuel (if that’s possible) on the Mid-East dumpster fire?

    Regarding alignment between the Pentagon, Congress and the American people, Congress just passed the largest peacetime military budget in history. I don’t see any positive reform there, unless the money somehow gets spent on actual soldiers and their needs, rather than the needs of defense contractors in northern Virginia. What other reform do you think may be in the offering?

  9. There doesn’t need to be any direct causal connection for astrology to work; correlation is good enough. As long as the cycles that govern human affairs happen to match up with planetary motions, the predictions will be fruitful, whether or not there is any influence exerted.

  11. Hi John,
    Thanks especially for the astrology intro. I had always figured no one was claiming that the known physical forces had anything to do with it. (Hence, the pointless criticisms that the gravitational influence of your overweight friend would count for more than that of Saturn.) A more intelligent criticism that I’ve heard is the claim that so many factors are involved in astrology that it’s unfalsifiable; any of numerous factors can be tweaked after the fact. Well, I will say that such criticisms apply in spaced to much economic and political discussions; tweaking-after-the-fact is a widespread intellectual vice. That said, Einstein reminds us that (paraphrasing) a theory should be as simple as possible but no simpler. And a theory that has to account for more than a few major bodies in the solar system is going to have some irreducible complexity. For my part, I have an open mind toward the subject: if astrology, or any other discipline, can make predictions that are both correct and falsifiable, then it has a prima facie claim to offering a useful grasp of reality. Why something works is a separate question, and the initial theories are often much simpler than the phenomena they try to describe, owing to the search for essential features.

  12. Maybe this is a dumb question (it certainly is an ignorant one). What do you mean by “cast and delineate” a chart? You mention that this reading is only good for three months, and we will need to do another one on the solstice to see further into the future. But we know where all the celestial objects will be in three months, so why do we have to wait? What am I missing here?

  13. Are the charts at future dates predictable? If so, can the time frame of the “crash” everyone is expecting be predicted?

  14. You have that nice habit of revisiting your new years eve predictions yearly, looking how they panned out.
    I recall that you did a astrological cast for your nation earlier… Was it a year ago?
    I would love to hear your thoughts on that one now, when we have the answers at hand!

  15. Thank you, John Michael, for the astrological information. Does anything “trump” astrogical predictions? To what degree can sentient beings create a future that is opposed to what the charts say? Could a mass of people, for example, work together (in theory) to create a spell that would result in significantly different outcomes than the chart predicts? And if we could, in theory, move a planet from one place to another, would that change things, or is the force that moves the heavens uninfluenceable by one small overgrown species on one little planet?

  16. I greatly appreciate your measured approach to divination, and your frequent admonitions that nothing in any divination is as bad as you think it is.

    A few years ago there was a major astrological event– I can’t remember what exactly. Maybe in eclipse in a particularly scary sign, conjunct Mars or Saturn. A few days later I was meeting with a client on an unrelated matter. She saw an astrology page bookmarked on my web browser, and mentioned that she and her friends who follow that sort of thing had been expecting a big world-shaking event, but then “Nothing happened.” I pointed out that nothing had, in fact, not happened– the aspect (whatever it was, someone must remember) coincided exactly with the beginning of Russia’s intervention in Syria. Of course, this represented a seismic shift in international affairs– but it didn’t involve an alien invasion, a nuclear holocaust, or The Singularity, and so the big New Age Astrological Freakout Facebook Pages hadn’t seen it as worth mentioning.

  17. Yorkshire, I haven’t looked into that. You’ll have to ask someone who has.

    Djerek, I haven’t looked into that, either, but that’s an interesting data point.

    Johanna, I know very little about Jyotish — classic Western tropical astrology is enough to keep me busy! I know of people whose opinions I respect who speak highly of it, though. As for Scorpio, I may be the outlier here; I have Neptune in Scorpio but that’s it, and of course that placement is shared by most of a generation.

    Dwig, that’s a very common application of mundane astrology. I haven’t done it here because this is a blog post, not a book!

    Will, since the US doesn’t have Mars in any of the angular houses, it’s probably not going to get directly involved in a war even if Mexico gets into one. You’d want to see what else is going on in Mexico’s Aries ingress, and also take a look at the foundation chart for Mexico as an independent nation, to get a clearer sense of what’s up there.

    Dewey, no problem. There are two sets of pie-shaped wedges in astrology. One is the signs, and those are exactly 30 degrees wide at the base. The other is the houses, and they aren’t equal in width — there are various ways of calculating them, most of which are based on time — the idea is that a star, on average, takes the same amount of time to pass through each house in the course of one rotation of the Earth). I use the Placidus system of calculating houses, because I’ve found that by and large it gets me the best results.

    Packshaud, I haven’t looked into that. There are people who do that kind of research, but I’d rather test it out by casting charts and making predictions, and seeing how they turn out.

    Ben, good question. I just read in today’s news that Mitch McConnell, of all people, is proposing legislation to legalize hemp growing in the US, so just about anything is possible!

    John, oh, granted, but there’s always the suspicion that correlation may be pointing at the existence of some unnoticed common factor.

    Twin Ruler, yes. Your point?

    Greg, you’re quite correct that astrology is by and large unfalsifiable, but the same is true of political science, economics, sociology, and most aspects of psychology — once you have to deal with independent variables you can’t isolate and control, your chance of strict falsifiability go out the window — and the universe, of course, is under no obligation to limit the problems it throws at us to those that we can understand via falsifiable experiments. As you note, if it works well enough to offer meaningful and accurate predictions, that’s reason enough to study it.

    Adam, to cast a chart is to do the math (or have your computer do the math) to figure out where the planets, house cusps, etc. will be. To delineate a chart is to figure out what it means and write that down. (This week’s post is a delineation.) Of course you could do that as far in advance as you want to; you could sit down right now and cast and delineate an Aries ingress chart for Washington DC for the year 2525, on the off chance that Washington DC is still the capital of a nation by then. Most astrologers do each ingress chart a little before the ingress, though, and leave it at that, because delineation is a lot of work.

    Matt, of course you can calculate charts in advance — thousands of years in advance, if you want to. Let me whisper this into your ear: what if you did that and found out that the crash everyone’s been expecting isn’t going to happen?

    Alnusincana, you can find my prediction from a year ago right here. Give it a read and let me know what you think. Does it do a fair job of anticipating the six months from March 21, 2017 to September 22 of the same year?

  18. Hey JMG,

    Thanks for the info. It’s my opinion that one of the reasons astrology gets a bad rap is because of the newspaper horoscopes, which often are vague yet positive, sort of like the fortunes in Chinese desserts. When I was a kid and got a TI-30 calculator, it came with a procedure on calculating one’s biorhythms, which I believe were physical, emotional and mental. My backtest indicated the date I took the ACT (which I did well on), I was peaking with two of them, and near an inflection point with the third. It didn’t seem to “work” on other major events in my life though, and I’m guessing more stringent calculations are necessary (like with astrology) to gain more accuracy.

    Your interpretation here appears to have some dependency on the individual astrologer. If we compared your analysis versus 9 others of equal skill using the same general method, how much “range” would we expect in the analysis?

  19. Skylight, there’s an old saying: “the wise govern their stars, fools are governed by them.” If you know what’s in your natal chart and what influences are affecting it at any given moment, you can make use of all the wiggle room you’ve got to bias things toward results you like — for example, if you’ve got a transit that threatens some kind of bad accident, you can decide not to go bungee jumping that day, and your accident may be nicking your hand with a paring knife rather than having your head mashed in because the bungee cord snapped! As for moving a planet, that’s the kind of dumb experiment I hope nobody ever gets around to trying.

    Steve, excellent! One other factor to keep in mind that if a scary astrological event happens, and it doesn’t have any connection to your natal chart or to the ingress chart of the country you live in, you probably won’t notice because it won’t affect you.

    Drhooves, newspaper astrology columns have about as much to do with real astrology as Young Frankenstein has to do with real science. The newspaper astrologers have done a lot of harm to astrology over the years! As for the variability from one astrologer to another, there’ll be some, but the basic rules are pretty firm — if you pick up a copy of H.S. Green’s classic manual of mundane astrology, for example, and go through the chart here, you’ll find that I haven’t varied much from the classic rules except in matters of detail.

  20. @Will J

    The best candidate I can think of is the “War on Drugs” here in the US and the control the drug cartels have over large swathes of Mexico. Tamaulipas and a few other Mexican states have a travel ban right now, basically the US government has declared the areas as dangerous as Syria. Friends and family who still go there say the first 3 blocks from the Texas border are still safe enough for tourism but they generally don’t go much further than that.

    You don’t hear much about it in the news, but the cartels fight each other for power and they bribe the government or murder officials and reporters. It’s been a big problem in Tamaulipas since around 2005, when a group of about 20 Mexican soldiers and a truck disappeared… and then a new cartel appeared (apparently started by the AWOL soldiers). Ciudad Juarez (which is further north) couldn’t keep a police chief alive longer than a year at that point. From what I hear, it’s only gotten worse since then. It will most likely continue until the cartels have established their territories, and then it will get peaceful again until they have reason for another round of disputes (the same thing happened with the early 80s being dangerous, tapering to the 90s which were quite safe, at least on the part of the border where I grew up).

    Sincerely
    Jessi Thompson
    anotheramethyst

  22. Interesting. I don’t know much about it, but I was a bit surprised that you didn’t mention the Mercury/Venus conjunction in the 10th house. Since Mercury is communication and the media, and Venus is wmen’s issues then perhaps the beneficial thing you mention is that women finally manage to grab the mic and get a better deal (equal pay, for instance) which goes through congress. Trump might even help to try and raise his popularity with women voters!

  23. Just curious: Is astrology for yourself (or a client) a subset of natal astrology or more in line with the kind detailed above? Do you know (or have you written) a good book on this?

    I ask because planning for the future is a particular puzzle for me these days. My job category could be totally automated in 5 to 10 years. I’d feel bad for not being a more “highly skilled” worker, except doctors, lawyers, and other white collar workers could also see dramatic lob loss due to automation.

    I don’t think robots will be as effective as humans in these fields, but the horribly skewed rates of capital tax vs. income tax ensure companies will at least *try* to lead the U.S. toward catastrophic unemployment–and invest trillions in doing so.

    Basically, I’m happy to hear about a 3 month delay on any of the foretold apocalypses, but I’m beginning to realize it doesn’t really matter when a collapse will capture the attention of the cultural zeitgeist–when it will “happen” in the abstract. What I care about is when the apocalypse will happen to me.

  24. Is there any other method of future-casting that, in your opinion, has as good a track record for prediction as Astrology?
    To what extent does the result depend on the practitioner or other factors?
    I would be interested in a discussion of the pros and cons of different methods.

  25. Re: Why does astrology work?

    According to the Michael Teaching, it works because we want it to work (for a very expanded meaning of the word “we”).

    What this means is that there is an agreement in place that astrology will be taken into account in designing a life plan. It basically works in timing events in the plan. (This also works on larger scales, like social movements, nations and so forth.) It has no more or less Cosmic Significance than setting an alarm clock to wake up in time to get to work. You chose to use it to help structure your day.

  26. @dwig: Last year when JMG was discussing astrological charts I cast a charts for several upcoming ingresses and noticed the 2018 Aries Ingress for Washington DC appeared to indicate the USA would come under some kind of attack. So I cast the Aries Ingress chart for a number of of other world capitols, to see if the military threat might come from one or another of them.

    Charts for Moscow and Peking did not look like suspects; the charts that had Saturn and Mars on the Ascendant (suggesting an aggressor) were for Tokyo and Honolulu! Actually Puonyang, Korea is close enough to Tokyo that they might fill the bill.

  28. Also, it seems to me that it’s probably best to wait until shortly before the ingress to cast the chart and begin making predictions– that way you’re more likely to be familiar with the actual factors affecting the situation on the ground. It’s easy to imagine someone casting this very chart in, say, 1950, and concluding that it means that the United States will go to war with the Soviet Union.

  29. I have a book written by Reagan’s astrologer. I believe she did him quite a lot of good. And Nancy as well.

  30. I hear you about Jyotish. Its a changeling subjects that would take a lifetime to master. In fact I bet if J.K. Rowling ever introduced it to the Potter verse, it would be like what the Muggles called a college level course. What Jyotish does is to act like a microscope, to dwell deeper into every astrological sign. For instance of how two Scorpios act and think differently. Another interesting facet of Jyotish would be how it focuses on the Moon than the sun.They’re literally 27 lunar houses that Jyotish deems to be important to the overall chart. Not to mention that each house have their own particular nature, and my favorite, deities and attributes. Speaking of Harry Potter, I remembered there was a post about the main villain Voldemort. Well I looked into his birthday, I know J.K. Rowlling having birth dates for her characters she must know what she is doing, December 31, 1926 and found rather interesting details. Under the Jyotish system he’s a Sagittarius sun Scorpio Moon, while in western topical astrology he’s a Capricorn sun Scorpio moon.

  31. Hi John, I will be interested to see if the U. S. Congress actually does something to benefit us!

  32. Matt, yep.

    Reloaded15, the reason I didn’t discuss that is that Mercury is on the brink of a retrograde and Venus is in her detriment in Aries. Both planets are therefore very weak, and will have little impact on the chart. If Venus were in Taurus, which she rules, that would be another matter!

    Marcus, that’s a somewhat different matter. What you need there is a good natal astrologer who can examine your birth chart, and then work with your progressed chart — which shows how the potentials in your natal chart work out over the course of each year — to figure out what you can expect along these lines. I haven’t written anything on astrology yet, and the books I use are mostly quite old and assume a good solid background in astrological studies; you might ask around and see if anyone you know can recommend a good astrologer.

    Emmanuel, that’s a very complex question. There’s always a personal element in any system of divination — as with anything else, some people are better at it than others — and the personal element is frankly more significant than the system being used; a good diviner will get better results than a poor one, whatever the method they use.

    John, duly noted!

    Perfagereng, it’s very simple. Starting back in ancient Mesopotamia, people started tracking the movements of the planets and comparing them to events on Earth. Mars got its reputation because when it’s strong in a mundane chart, wars break out, and when it’s strong in a natal chart, the person in question is good at fighting. Thus it’s not that planets have human attributes; it’s that humans have planetary attributes…

    Steve, good. The competent astrologer always pays attention to what’s going on down here on Earth as well as up there in the heavens, in order to be able to anticipate how astrological factors will work out in actual events.

    Onething, interesting. Thank you.

    Johanna, well, classical Western astrology is also a subject that can take at least a lifetime of study, so I’m not surprised that this is also true of Jyotish!

    Fuzzy, stranger things have happened. 😉

  33. Another influence that suggests continued good economic times for the next three months: the Part of Fortune is almost exactly conjunct the North Node in the 2nd (money) house. The Cancer ingress chart, which I went ahead and looked at, seems to be more concerning, in part because Uranus will have ingressed into Taurus by then but also because of the Venus-Mars opposition on the nodal axis and in money houses again.

    I took a look at the Beijing Aries ingress chart, and it has both Mars and Saturn in the 1st with the Ascendant ruler Jupiter retrograde in the 12th. Would this seem to suggest that China might be on the cusp of another round of internal agitation and/or repression?

  34. Barrigan, I’m looking at the Cancer ingress right now, and it’s an extremely busy chart. I note that, just as in the current chart, Neptune is conjunct the midheaven, Saturn is conjunct the 7th house cusp, and Jupiter is in the fifth house, so some of the basic framework hasn’t changed at all. We’ll get to that in three months. As for Beijing, yes, that’s one possibility; I don’t really have the time, or the local knowledge, to give it a proper delineation, though.

  36. I know a German whose hometown is berchtesgaden. As he was growing up he would interview Hitler’s drivers, and gardeners and such, who it seems universally adored him. Early in his political career an astrologer told hitler he would never die from assassination, so hitler didn’t have many bodyguards, and he did survive some 30 assassination attempts, one which injured the man who would become his father in law years later.

  37. JMG, Just one small criticism, the chart is too small. It would have been easier to follow you explanation with a chart that was large enough to read. I do realize that might have been a WordPress formatting issue, or an understandable desire to not publish a chart that could stolen by others. A bigger chart would be helpful, though. You mentioned doing a chart far into the future. Obviously at the time of death/collapse something would be glaringly obvious in the chart, but the planets keep on turning. Is there a way to know that you are looking at a “dead” chart, if you did not read through that moment of ultimate crisis? Just curious.

  38. JMG,

    I don’t know Mexico or astrology well enough to cast a chart for the country. I just note that it seems interesting that it has Mars in the 7th house.

    Jessi,

    That seems plausible. Well, we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.

  39. On a different note, if open discussion is allowed this week, I have another question I’d like to ask. I saw someone post on one of the Magic Mondays about some spells the anti-trumpers are casting, including death spells, and I’ve come across a few people casting similar spells. Most of them aren’t terribly dangerous (especially sine the people casting them have no clue what they’re doing), but there’s one I’m slightly worried about. I’ve been introduced me to some occultists who say they are casting a working to try to kill Trump and all his supporters.

    I personally support Trump in the sense of viewing him as the least bad option, and know people who strongly support him, and since at least some of the people casting it seem to know what they’re doing (and at least one has outright said she accepts that this’ll shorten her life, probably by a great deal), I think this may end up harming me, and it’s very likely to hurt people I know.

    Do you have advice for dealing with this? Is it safer to avoid getting involved, do my daily banishing ritual, and try to avoid getting hit with this, or are there spells, practices, etc you know that can help protect against this?

  40. Is there a proper name for this presentation of the chart?
    To clarify, your chart only shows the signs at the house cusps, in that degree-sign-minute format.

  41. House 2 looks well aspected too; so … no loss of reserve currency status for the USD either, I’m guessing. Tsk … what a boring chart 😉

  42. Let me note that Aquarius is on the 9th house cusp, ruled by Uranus, and Uranus is one of the planets you note in your comment about Congress actually doing something, This suggests to me that there may be a Supreme Court decision involved. I note that the Supreme Court has a pair of cases involving political gerrymandering before it, one Republican and one Democratic. That decision will probably come down in the next three months.

  43. Thanks for the explanation of houses – but now I am left trying to fathom how you know, if there’s so much variability in the length of time stars take to move through various houses, where those lines would be drawn for any given chart. How did people do this stuff before computers, anyway? I can’t imagine doing it by hand.

  44. Valenzuela,

    Mars in the 8th house might make more sense. I used an online chart generator to check, since I figured that Mexico was close enough to the US that it might be interesting to see what differences and similarities there were. I won’t pretend to understand well enough to say if it was right though checking again it does give the same results: Mars is just narrowly within the 7th house.

  45. Since the US chart is kinda more of the same for the time being, I thought I’d look across the pond at the flustered duck (I think that’s how Jim Kunstler puts it 😉 that is the UK at the moment. Specifically, I wondered if my very limited knowledge of mundane astrology would still allow me to see anything of the Russia-did-it shenanigans over there at the moment. I was not disappointed (which does not mean I’m right).

    Anyway, following your model, the first thing I noticed is that the ascendant is in Virgo – a mutable sign – meaning the chart is valid for six months until the equinox in September.

    Next, the Sun is in the 7th house and within a couple of degrees of the 8th house cusp. Assuming this represents prime minister May, then she looks to be in deep, deep do-do; the 7th being the house of other countries (EU, Russia) and she’s applying to the house of death (8th). On top of that she’s squared by Mars – never good news – which ordinarily would be the military, but might also be the opposition, as in Corbyn and the factions within her own party. To cap it all though, there’s Neptune in the 7th, too, which surely stands for fantasies about foreign countries (Russkies under the bed, getting a great deal with the EU). My guess is that, being that close to the eighth house, she isn’t going to survive the next six months as prime minister.

    That opinion is backed up by Mars being in the 4th house; according to Skyscript, “a malefic in this house may afflict the government”, but guess what? There are two malefics in the 4th house, Saturn, in his own sign of Capricorn, is there too! That’s gotta be curtains there, hasn’t it?

    The moon, representing the people, however, is in the 9th house trined by both Saturn and the ascendant. The 9th house covers, among other things (transportation mainly) the law courts, so it looks like the people gain the upper hand through the judiciary. My guess is that they undo Brexit thanks to the Cambridge Analytica fallout, and because they believe with almost religious fervor (there’s some support from Neptune) that the EU is a benign force.

    As usual, we’ll see. I don’t pretend to know the real ins and outs of the British government and people, and am only posting this here to add to the conversation.

  46. Will J,

    I just generated a chart and got Mars in the 8th house. Could you post the time, location and generator you used for your chart?

  47. DaShui, that seems quite probable. Hitler was an occultist — I have no idea why this is so controversial a statement in some circles, as it requires very little research into the man’s early life to find all the usual footprints in all the usual places. He was, specifically, the kind of occultist who thought he could ignore magical ethics…and you’ll notice how that turned out! But it would be very much in keeping with his background to pay close attention to astrology, and take a reading like that seriously.

    Btidwell, that’s as big of a chart as I can put on WordPress, so you’re out of luck. As for a “dead” chart (in the sense you mean), not that I know of.

    Will, given the dismal level of competence being displayed in spell design by the people doing this stuff, a daily banishing ritual ought to keep you perfectly safe.

    Jeffrey, it’s the standard way of presenting an astrological chart in the English-speaking world, so no, there’s no particular term for it.

    Marco, yep. The 2nd house is ruled by the very well dignified Moon, so for the next three months, at least, the dollar will remain tolerably stable.

    John, that’s quite plausible — or a decision in the courts more generally.

    Dewey, back in the pre-computer days, there were tables of house cusps, and learning how to get the right cusps was a basic element of astrological training. Most people these days simply have the computer do it. (I still have tables of houses, of course, and know how to use them.)

    Reloaded15, I don’t know which British people you’re thinking of when you suggest that “they” support the EU; a good many of those with whom I’ve corresponded over the last few years have the opposite attitude — and of course the outcome of the Brexit vote itself does suggest that support for the EU is a minority view.

    Let’s take a closer look, though. If Virgo is rising, Mercury represents the people of Britain, and Mercury is stationary, on the brink of going retrograde, and conjuct a badly afflicted Venus. The tenth house cusp is Gemini, which is also ruled by Mercury. So what we can expect in Britain for the next six months is ineffective mumbling and fumbling on the part of both the government and the people, largely focused on issues of foreign trade and who owes who how much (Mercury in the 8th), and a great deal of fantasy and deception out of Whitehall on questions related to foreign powers (Sun and Neptune in the 7th, and Pisces, ruled by Neptune, on the 7th house cusp). Mars is angular in the 4th house, so there will very likely be some large terrorist attack (Mars conjunct Saturn) on British soil (the 4th house of land and territory) during this six month period. Those are the things that stand out immediately to me.

  48. Will and Valenzuela (if I may), please also post which house system you’re using, since different systems of house division put the cusps in slightly different places.

  49. John–

    It will be interesting to see if/how Trump’s recent announcement of his indication to withdraw from Syria — good news if he follows through — fits into the terrain you mapped out here. I don’t care for man personally, but if he occasionally does the right things for the wrong reasons, I’ll take it. I could definitely see the broader (working class) populace responding positively to this move.

  50. You could very well be right about Pluto’s influence diminishing in the coming years, but I really do think that this won’t really start to happen until Pluto completes it sojourn through Capricorn in a few years, at the earliest. I can imagine a bit of a storm in the financial markets during the second and third weeks of April when Mars, Pluto, and Saturn will be in a loose stellium formation. But you are probably right about the holding pattern in which the national life will remain throughout the spring season. So while there may be some pretty dramatic numbers in red during those two weeks, probably the worst that will happen is that the current bubble will loose some air but not “pop”.

  51. JMG, you mentioned Saturn in the 10th house, and what that means for the US. Will such a catastrophic fall be predicted by a mundane ingress?

  53. It certainly looks like a major shakeup is coming for the tech industry. Faceplant has been implicated in a huge scandal that could end up costing it trillions in fines, there has been another fatal accident involving a self-driving car and now President Trump is once again attacking the Evil Empire for its predatory business practices, pointing out that Amazon has driven thousands of retailers of out business while being the beneficiary of preferential treatment by the U.S. Postal Service and tax policies that give it an unfair advantage over its competitors. One of his specific criticisms is that Amazon pays little or no tax to state and local governments thanks to tax policies that favor online retailers, depriving them of billions in badly needed revenue while putting traditional “brick and mortar” retailers at a massive disadvantage.

    Tech industry stocks have been dropping sharply because investors are getting spooked and many analysts say that stricter regulation of tech companies is probably a question of when and how severe, not if. While the establishment has been criticizing Trump’s targeting of Amazon, it’s very much in line with his championing policies that favor ordinary working Americans at the expense of the affluent urban overclass and special interest groups with close ties to them, including the tech industry. These are the very groups that have benefited enormously from policies that impoverished the American working class (of all races) and the flyover states, not to mention huge numbers of exploited peoples in 3rd world countries. Not surprisingly, they are screaming bloody murder now that we have a president willing to take them on. Let them whinge. I have little or no sympathy for people who have maintained their privileged lifestyles at the expense of everyone else, from working class Americans to Mexican farmers who lost their livelihoods and family farms thanks to NAFTA to Chinese sweatshop workers who are mercilessly exploited by companies like Nike, Apple and their local subcontractors.

    It seems to me that attempts by the establishment to defend companies like Amazon and the policies that give Amazon and companies like it an unfair advantage while attacking Trump for pointing these things out will end up backfiring. This is one of the reasons why I expect that Trump will win and win big in the 2018 and 2020 elections.

  54. I know, it’s a total no-brainer to me that the Brits should be anti-EU, but I know quite a few and, with a very few exceptions, they’re all doing the Hillary-stomp that the leavers won.

    Thanks for your analysis and I see that I still have a lot to learn!

  55. Wow. The woman knows her anti-Trump spell will probably kill her, it’s spring 2018 and he leaves office in January 2021, and she’s going ahead? You’d have to be crazy. Especially since if the anti-Trump hex works, he will be replaced by a man known to his colleagues as Mike Dense.

    I wonder why Trump Derangement Syndrome is so much worse than Obama and Bush derangement?

  56. The working that Will J talked about to kill Trump and all of his supporters is a sign of just how unhinged many of his opponents really are.

    and at least one has outright said she accepts that this’ll shorten her life, probably by a great deal.

    Examples like this suggest that in many cases, Trump Derangement Syndrome is literally driving people insane. Not to mention that if the working goes as planned (extremely unlikely), it would result in the deaths of hundreds of millions of people around the world and not just in the US. That would be a death toll that would make Hitler, Stalin and Mao drool with envy. Do these people realize just how seriously evil and insane an act this is that they are attempting to carry out?

    At the same time, I am reminded of a case that our host talked about in Circles of Power. An occultist who was upset by the use of animals in medical research conducted a series of workings aimed at killing scientists who engaged in animal experimentation. Her first two targets were minor figures who died fairly quickly. Her third target was Louis Pasteur, who was a hero to millions around the world and protected by the prayers and goodwill of the French people. So it was the one who conducted the working who died soon afterwards while Pasteur was completely unharmed. My own suspicion is that the same will happen in this case. Trump has huge numbers of supporters around the world and millions who pray for his safety and success daily. There are Christian churches, bible study groups and so on who urge their members to pray for Trump’s protection every day. This working will almost certainly blow up in the faces of the people carrying it out while failing to accomplish its objective.

  57. @Dewey
    Re: Placidus

    Here’s an explanation for how Placidus works. Before I get into it, please note that this system was invented sometime in the Middle Ages, by a monk named Placidus (I think). Originally, Western Astrology as we know it (more or less) used “sign as house.” That is, the sign with the ascendent was the first house, the next sign counter-clockwise was the second house etc, which is the same as Joytsh. More complicated systems of house division came later.

    Placidus is one of a large number of ways of dividing the celestial sphere up into 12 houses. Most astrologers couldn’t tell you exactly how it does it, just that it works for them (or doesn’t work for them). I know at least one published astrologer who says that she has to determine which house system works best for each client.

    If you’re interested in the technical details, here it is. If you’re not, skip to the next post. (There is no math in this presentation.)

    While a lot of astrologers will tell you that it involves time, I find that a simple geometrical presentation works, and is a lot easier to understand. (This is how a computer program does it.) It goes in two stages.

    In the first stage, visualize a sphere that represents Earth, with another sphere that represents the sphere of the heavens. (They can be the same sphere, which simplifies things as long as you keep a couple of details separate.)

    In planetary terms, we have the Equator, and we have parallels of longitude: that is, circles parallel to the equator. When you project these onto the sphere of the heavens, these are called the Celestial Equator and parallels of declination.

    Now if you imagine you’re standing on the earth looking at a point in the sky, like the Sun, Moon, a planet, a star, the Galactic Overlord’s spaceship, whatever, you’ll see it go from East to West along one of these parallels of declination.

    Here’s the division: the part of the parallel that’s above the horizon is called the diurnal (day) semi-arc, and the part that’s below the horizon is called the nocturnal (night) semi-arc. Each semi-arc is divided into six equal segments. The segments in the diurnal semi-arc are, from East to West, the 12th, 11, 10th, 9th, 8th and 7th houses. The segments in the nocturnal semi-arc are, from West to East, the 6th, 5th, 4th, 3rd, 2nd and 1st houses.

    If you’re standing on the Equator, the Horizon is exactly perpendicular to the Equator, both semi-arcs are the same length and everything works nicely. If you’re standing anywhere else, though, the Horizon is tilted with respect to the Celestial Equator, and the lines of declination are split unequally: that is, the diurnal semi-arc is larger or smaller than the nocturnal semi-arc. This is part of the reason that the houses are of unequal size.

    This is the first stage: it allows you to calculate the true Placidus location of any point whatsoever (right up to the poles, with a minor adjustment). It does not, however, give you the house cusps you see on the horoscope chart. That’s the second stage.

    Now that you’ve got the initial visualization, add the Ecliptic. That’s a second circle that’s tilted to the Equator by 23 and a fraction degrees. To get the house cusps, you simply find the places on the Ecliptic where it crosses a parallel of declination at the exact point where the semi-arc is divided into sixths. This works as long as no part of the Ecliptic is circumpolar, that is, it never rises or sets. If any part of the Ecliptic is circumpolar, it is impossible to cast a normal chart without the house cusps going wonky. That is, a cusp may be missing, there may be two of the same cusp, they may go in reverse order or something.

  61. Sounds completely likely to me. Of course, you are extrapolating from the current situation. I see your predictions last year matched the outcome pretty closely. The three-month time frame is interesting. Russia will not want to rock the boat too much until the World Cup is over. I’m sure their enemies will try to take advantage of that with intensified cold war tactics. My New Year’s dream told me to expect a lot of cruelty from people who enjoy that sort of thing and have the power to do it (and also that you don’t want to be mistaken for one of the perpetrators or abettors later on, so taking a public stand to help the victims is advisable). Perhaps joltin’ Bolton will be the straw that finally breaks that camel’s back and our legislative branch will be motivated to do something for a change, as you predict. I hope so.

  62. If you don’t mind Mr. Greer, what is your moon sign? Mine is Aquarius and if you can what do you think about this sun and moon combination? Scorpio Sun Aquarius Moon.

  63. @Will J, Jessi T, Valenzuela

    If the participants in Mexican violence and conflict were driven by ideology instead of (illicit) profit, there would be no question we’re at civil war right now. Instead, we have proto-warbands competing with each other (and the government) for control and influence in different areas of the country.

    On the other hand, it is plausible enough that you are seeing the harbinger of a defunct NAFTA, or a heavily revisited one (with worse terms, for us).

    You should also notice that 2018 is election year in Mexico, and pretty much every major party has given up on offering anything to the electorate (nobody would believe them, anyways). Instead, it is all about imprinting the citizen’s minds with fluffy feel-good imagery that is anchored to your party’s brand (and which is impossible to debate with, not having any relationship with any actual policies), on the one hand; and on the other, to soil your opponents’ names as much as you can get away with, barely short of getting diffamation charges. This is a tendency that has been happening for at least a decade now, and it has a specific name: La Guerra Sucia (the dirty war).

  64. Regarding Arguments between President Trump and the military, as well as reforms coming to the military – much chatter has recently surfaced about the plan to have the border wall built by the Army corps of engineers rather than a civilian contractor. Changing the core mission of the military from foreign adventurism to fixing domestic infrastructure (thereby cutting off a popular avenue of funnelling public money into private corporations) would undoubtedly ruffle quite a few feathers indeed. But I could certainly see the citizenry and much of the military being in agreement that it’s a change for the better, while the leaders who have to implement it are much less serene about the process.

  65. Archdruid,

    Maybe a cancellation of the F-35 program? Okay now I’m definitely hoping for a miracle.

    By the way do you know the one astrological reading that will predict the end of the world?

    To anyone else,

    Could someone do a reading for madisob, wi? I’m very curious to know what’s in store for me state…

  66. David, if he can talk the Pentagon into admitting that the Syrian venture has failed, and get them to bring our special forces and mercenaries home from there. that would be a major achievement — and if that happens, it’ll be entertaining to watch the Democrats find some way to insist that less war is a bad thing…

    Mister N., au contraire, Pluto began losing force in 2006, and to judge by the example of Ceres, it’ll be a very minor factor by 2036. Did you notice that the much-ballyhooed Pluto-Uranus square a few years ago caused only temporary disruptions in the stock market, not the gargantuan crash so many people were predicting? I’m going to predict that the same thing will happen this time.

    Shane, yes, but it’s tricky, because ingresses show tendencies rather than destinies. The ingress for the period when the US collapses should show multiple negative aspects or conjunctions to the Saturn position in the US foundation chart, 14º Libra 48′, but such aspects may show up several times before crunch time arrives — they indicate the possibility of imminent collapse, not the certainty of it.

    Valenzuela, thank you. Will, what house system were you using?

    Felix, bingo. Trying to convince the average American voter to feel sorry for Jeff Bezos is not a winning strategy, but it’s one I expect the Dems to double down on in the years immediately ahead.

    Reloaded15, interesting. We run with different Brits, then!

    Fuzzy, good question. I honestly don’t know.

    Felix, yep. The blowback from this is likely to be pretty horrific.

    Phil K., to my mind, the entire EU was untenable from the get-go. Thanks for the essay!

    Beaver, since I didn’t predict any fire and brimstone, you may be waiting a very long time.

    Shane, I was at a Masonic dinner this evening, and the Roseanne revival was discussed, with general approval; some of the brothers also mentioned that the creators of the iconic cartoon show South Park have come out as Republicans. I wonder why nobody on the left has realized that if you make being a Trump-supporting Republican the most shocking and unacceptable thing there is, all the people who want to be shocking and unacceptable — i.e., most teenagers and a lot of the cultural avant-garde — will become Trump-supporting Republicans: what better way to shock their moms?

    As for the Christian movement of the poor, bingo — this is something I’ve seen coming, and predicted, for some time now. Hang onto your hats; American Christianity’s finished its most recent conservative swing, and the pendulum is heading in the other direction.

    Patricia O., mundane astrology, when it’s done right, takes events on earth into account as well as events in the heavens!

    Johanna, my moon’s in Leo. I’ve never really known how to answer a question like “what do you think of X combination”, other than the fact that it’s one of 144 possible combinations of sun and moon sign, each of which has its unique challenges and possibilities!

  67. Christopher, possibly, but the 11th house involvement suggests that Congress will be involved in it also.

    Varun, definitely a miracle! As for the one astrological reading that predicts the end of the world, well, if this is a joke, no, I don’t; if it’s not, the old Stoics used to say that when all the planets are conjunct in Cancer the world will be destroyed by fire, and when they’re all conjunct in Capricorn the world will be destroyed by water.

  68. The ingress for the period when the US collapses should show multiple negative aspects or conjunctions to the Saturn position in the US foundation chart, 14º Libra 48′

    Wait a minute… if I’m reading the charts right and estimating the angles correctly, doesn’t that describe the next two American ingresses?

    Aries 2018: opposition to conjunct Mercury-Venus, square conjunct Mars-Saturn; either Uranus or the Sun might also be in opposition to 14º Libra 48′ (can’t make out the angle clearly), and I think the North Node might also be making an aspect (sextile?).
    Cancer 2018: conjunct Moon, possibly opposition Uranus, trine Mars, square Saturn and Mercury, sextile Venus conjunct North Node. I can’t tell whether the Sun is trine, square, or neither re: 14º Libra 48′.

    Hmm.

  69. EDIT: I should probably make clear that my last post was listing off the aspects I was seeing to the 14º Libra 48′ Saturn of the foundational chart. (Might well have some wrong – I’m trying to estimate the angles in my head, error bars are implied.)

  70. I don’t think we will see the cancellation of the F-35 Lardbucket, at least not in the foreseeable future. Now that would be a true miracle and a sign of serious military reform.

    However, the US Air Force announced the other day that if costs don’t come down substantially and in the near future, it will have to cut back it’s F-35 order by as much as a third, amounting to nearly 600 planes. Some analysts are saying that if that happens, it could trigger a death spiral for the F-35 program.

    Because the overhead costs for the F-35 are so high to begin with, losing that many orders from Lockheed’s biggest customer would force them to pass on the costs to their remaining customers in a way that would drive the already excessive costs right through the roof. Many F-35 customers are already talking of cutting back their orders because they can’t afford to buy as many as originally intended. Some British military experts are saying the RAF and RN will likely cut their Lardbucket orders to less than a third of what they had originally planned and replace the remainder with Eurofighter Typhoons, which are much better airplanes anyways.

  71. Hi JMG,

    Thanks for the earlier response. The more I think about it, I’m beginning to think the elites don’t mind newspaper astrologists, as it casts a black eye on the practice. Heaven forbid the masses are exposed to any knowledge pertaining to systems and cycles not manipulated for the benefit of the elites. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from following your blogs, it’s the lack of quality in the education I received. The only time I recall astrology coming up in school was in WWII history, when the teacher was asked about Hitler using astrology. His off-hand response was something to the effect of, “well, that didn’t work out too well for him, now did it?” I don’t think an hour or two spent covering the basics of astrology, in history and/or astronomy classes would have been too harmful.

    Question – the posts so far have been on personal, economic and political applications from your delineation. Can events/changes with animals and the environment also be analyzed through astrology? It seems to have that Big Picture Cycle vibe to it.

  72. Could the stuff about Mars be related to the recent (March 4th) nerve agent attack on UK soil on some Russians living in Salisbury, which is being blamed on the Russian government? (I don’t know myself whether the accusations are true or not.) Various countries, beginning with the UK but also including the US now, have been expelling Russian diplomats – and Russia has been expelling diplomats in return.

    I agree that if the UK ingress chart is showing benefits for the British people, it’s more likely to be something that’s favourable to Brexit. Maybe I should look up the UK ingress chart myself and have a closer look at it, even though I’m nowhere near an expert at astrology yet.

  73. Did you notice that the much-ballyhooed Pluto-Uranus square a few years ago caused only temporary disruptions in the stock market, not the gargantuan crash so many people were predicting? I’m going to predict that the same thing will happen this time.

    I think that what happened during the Pluto-Uranus Square is that tension built up and built up and built up, and all this stored up tension will be released in an astrological “storm” that will happen during the two-year period (next year and the year after) in which Pluto is in a wide-orb conjunction pretty much the entire time with Saturn in Capricorn. The upcoming two-week period of loose Stellium of Mars, Pluto, and Saturn could be a small foretaste of the big storm I’m predicting. Then come about 2024 when Pluto starts moving out of Capricorn, that’s when we will see Pluto lose much of the astrological gravity it has had in our lifetimes.

  74. If you can posit a specific alignment that would cause a specific (kind of) effect, can’t you take a computer and use it to calculate *when* it’s going to happen?

  75. Hi John Michael,

    It is endlessly fascinating to me that people feel that some sort of fast crash, economically, politically, or socially is going to happen anytime soon. As far as I can understand things, we’re already heading downhill, and have been doing so for quite a while now. Far out, I talk to people about food quality – which is a pet interest of mine, after all – and that has been going down the gurgler for as long as I am aware of things. But it is so slow that few people take any active interest because they adapt. As a species, I’d have to suggest that we are pretty good at adapting, don’t you reckon?

    Rant, rant, rant! The weather is quite nice here at the moment. Sunny and warm but not too hot! Hope you get some normal spring weather (whatever normal is nowadays) soon!

    Cheers

    Chris

  76. It’s a bizarre world we live in where Donald Trump is a working class populist and Roseanne Barr is pushing the envelope for civil dialogue between opposing sides. She interjects a lot of herself into her work, and in the episode, which I’ve yet to see all of, Laurie Metcalf’s character is wearing a pussy hat and a “Nasty Woman” tee, while Barr, of course, supports Trump. It’s supposed to model civil dialogue and coming together in spite of differences. Read Barr’s quotes in the following article, JMG, you and her have a lot in common! She’s still as crude as the day she sang the national anthem, but so was my heavy drinking, swore like a sailor Aunt Nea, but she had a heart of gold. Before I knew any better about TV, Roseanne was a staple of my childhood, and Roseanne’s treatment of gay issues made quite the impact in my Central KY high school when it aired in the early 90s. It also stands another binary on its head–that you either are or become a bigot when you support Trump–this episode deals with Sara Gilbert’s character’s gender bending son (Grandma Roseanne is supportive) and a biracial son/daughter duo w/Michael Fishman’s character, which was encouraged by Barr.
    http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Culture/roseanne-barr-call-trump-exciting-sweet-shows-ratings/story?id=54090651

  77. JMG
    Apropos your reply to Reloaded15 on Britain and the EU.

    It was the ‘Common Market’ back then in 1975 when I voted ‘Out’ because I did not like the direction it was going. I am still not a fan of the now ‘EU’, but this time I voted ‘Remain’ on a precautionary ‘Burkean’ principle, much as I voted against the ‘Thatcher Revolution’ in its day. These days all the young people I happen to know closely are despairing of their loss of EU citizenship and the passports that they have had all their lives. Nevertheless I abide by the recent result even though it was by no means overwhelming – we have a divided country – and I have to accept that the actual outcomes will need a lot more lying to make them fit the political narrative. Our lot just now demonstrate that they are pretty good at that across the range … ahem, Russia.

    Many areas of the country of course were on balance more enthusiastic than others about leaving the EU. They may however have some problems adjusting to real outcomes as these wing in. I was told by a young person how, herself grieving that morning, she watched the small fishing boats leave harbor – mostly for tourist business it has to be said – blaring out ‘Rule Britannia’. Needless to say these local enthusiasts have been seriously ‘scr…ed-over’ during latest negotiations. I wonder in the same vein about British farming which receives very large EU subsidies depending on the year and type and size of farm. Big ‘industrial’ farms tend to get most. They have been given assurance until 2020 that the UK government will maintain the subsidies. It will be interesting to see who gets what and who will be sacrificed. British farming is like one gigantic Elon Musk.

    And so it goes, as we sail off into the Atlantic, depending as we do on the continuities of American policy. I don’t have any problems btw with your analysis for Britannia over the next 6 months. Thanks.

    best
    Phil H

  79. PS–the scenarios in Roseanne are very typical of today’s working class: child (Sara Gilbert’s character) coming back home to live after loosing a job, another child (Michael Fishman’s character) who’s a vet returning from Afghanistan in biracial relationship, other child struggling in service sector job.

  80. @John Roth: “To get the house cusps, you simply find the places on the Ecliptic where it crosses a parallel of declination at the exact point where the semi-arc is divided into sixths.”

    Simply, right. 🙂 Still, I appreciate the explanation; clearly your latitude influences the size of the houses. (Which is probably one reason why early geographers such as al-Biruni spent so much time calculating latitudes and longitudes of specific places – to serve astrologers.)

    @ JMG: “if [Trump] can … bring our special forces and mercenaries home from [Syria]. that would be a major achievement — and if that happens, it’ll be entertaining to watch the Democrats find some way to insist that less war is a bad thing.”

    Agreed, absolutely, and I would have assumed Democrats would agree that less war is a good thing – on the flip side, if he instead starts an[other] aggressive war against Iran and any major powers that have the courage and foresight to stand with Iran, will you be equally confident that that’s a bad thing?

  82. I have a much easier spell to get rid of Trump, if such is your desire. Step 1: go down to your county clerk and register to vote in the appropriate party. Step 2: Contact that party and start working for them. Step 3 — search out alternate candidates in either the general election of 2020 or the primary, depending on your party…..you can fill in the rest.

  83. Besides all the current world events that have already been commented on here, one more piece of the puzzle:
    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-california-lawsuit-coffee/starbucks-coffee-in-california-must-have-cancer-warning-judge-says-idUSKBN1H5399

    It seems that we are seeing the blowback from the excesses of the past two or three decades.

    I guess this is a mosaic of such small facts that accrete and make up for large shifts in perception. As you have hinted, when the consequences of some excesses start to hit some on the lowest levels of the upper middle class, then we can expect some change to precipitate. Or it can converge towards unexpected events that we would later label black swans.
    I think the perceptive shift has already happened here, it is just waiting for the proverbial Black swan to emerge to our collective discourse & consciousness.

    By the way, is there an astrological notion of blowback and dealing with consequences (or getting your act together) ?

  84. My guess is that the Dems will respond without cries of outrage about any pullback in Syria b/c of the “loss of standing” in the world, and the ever obsessive nature about “not backing down from the Russians.” That’s why they supported Hillary so much, she was willing to wage war w/Russia, and why their so obsessed w/Russia now…

  85. “I don’t use minor bodies such as Ceres and Pluto in my charts, by the way. Did you know that Ceres used to count as a planet, the same way Pluto did? The astrology of planetary discovery is a fascinating field, and has much to say about changes in human history on the grand scale. So does the astrology of planetary downgrading, by the way-from an astrological point of view, the discoveries of Ceres and Pluto weren’t accidental, and their respective redefinitions as minor bodies weren’t accidental either. We’ll get to that in a post shortly.”

    Hi John Michael,

    I’m curious to know if, prior to 2006 when Pluto was officially demoted by the astronomical authorities, you did include Pluto in your charts? My comments may be premature as you’ve hinted at further elaboration regarding planetary discovery and downgrading, which I eagerly await.

    Pluto was discovered in 1930 and had been pretty thoroughly incorporated into 20th century astrology, ruler of Scorpio — dynamically potent both in a natal chart and by transit. I know you’re not a great fan of the esoteric and psychological directions which have dominated serious astrology in the modern era, and I agree that the pendulum has swung too far in that direction. But it is interesting that this trend really began gathering steam around the time Pluto was discovered, with practitioners becoming obsessed with plumbing the depths of the human psyche. Astrologers like Marc Edmund Jones, Dane Rudhyar, Isabel Hickey, Robert Hand, Stephen Arroyo and Liz Greene have made worthy contributions.

    I am not at all well versed in mundane astrology, but know that it’s foundations lie with the symbolism and vibrations of the seven classical planetary bodies of antiquity, visible with the naked eye. Clearly, more modern practitioners have incorporated the outer planets as they have been discovered, so I can only surmise that Pluto was included in their delineations. I just don’t get how it could be integrated/validated and then simply dropped. Are there mundane astrologers who don’t use any of the modern “transpersonal” planets?
    I’m so anxious to learn more of your thoughts about how the astrology of planetary discovery illuminates human history on a grand scale. Uranus and Neptune are immensely powerful…I’m not convinced Pluto should get the boot (full disclosure: I have an exact Sun/Pluto opposition in my natal map…I’m attached!).

    Thanks for the fascinating discussion.

    Jim

  87. Username, excellent! Let’s look at the two ingresses with that in mind. In the Aries ingress, the Mercury-Venus conjunction is indeed in opposition to the Saturn placement in the US foundation chart, but both planets are weak and not in aspect to anything else, so not enough to trigger a major event. (I suspect this means that the idea of a US collapse is going to get some air time in the media.) Saturn, on the other hand, does indeed square the foundation chart Saturn — Mars is too far away to be within the orb — thus the crisis in foreign affairs is a serious threat to US interests, if nothing more. Note also that Neptune is inconjunct the foundation chart Saturn; that’s a minor aspect but an influential one, and predicts strain, conflict, and frustration.

    Both the Saturn square and the Neptune inconjunct are repeated in the Cancer ingress, and as you’ve pointed out, there’s also a Moon conjunct the foundation chart Saturn, and Mercury — no longer retrograde, and strongly placed in the first house — is also square the foundation chart Saturn.

    I’d expect to see Mars or Uranus in some strong aspect to trigger the foundation chart Saturn when it actually, really does go kablooey, but the six months from now could well set the stage for that, or simply mark a lesser but still significant loss of power and influence for the US.

    Felix, I suspect you’re right. My working guess is that the Lardbucket program will wind down the same way the F-22 program did, with gargantuan cost overruns causing the program to be shut down way ahead of schedule, leaving the poor schmucks who actually have to fly the things saddled with yet another overhyped, overloaded, and inadequate plane.

    Drhooves, good question. In theory, yes, but you’d have to work out an entirely new branch of astrology, which we could as well call environmental astrology; just as natal astrology, horary astrology, mundane astrology, and so on all have their own special techniques, someone would have to work out comparable techniques to extract the kind of information you have in mind.

    L, nah, that took place during the time covered by the last ingress. The current ingress applies from March 20 onward.

    Mister Nobody, fair enough; you’ve made a specific, time-dated prediction, and that’s worthy of respect. My prediction is that the astrological storm you’re predicting isn’t going to happen, and markets are going to continue to lurch and fumble the way that they’ve been doing for years now. In a couple of years, we’ll see which of us is correct!

    aNeopuritan, sure, and some people do this.

    Chris, I think one of the reasons people fixate on sudden apocalyptic Hollywood collapses is that it allows them to ignore the steady grinding decline that’s going on all around them! Having not yet lived through a Rhode Island spring, I’m not sure what ordinary spring weather amounts to; at the moment it’s gray and drizzling, which reminds me of spring in Seattle. Also summer, autumn, and winter. 😉

    Shane, interesting. It really does look to me as though some of the most basic patterns in our contemporary culture are in flux.

    Phil H., many thanks for the data points!

    Dewey, of course. At this point, any war of choice the US enters into brings us closer to national collapse, and if Trump plunges into one, that’s a massive mistake and one that we’ll pay for in blood.

    Onething, er, I’m trying to parse this. Perhaps you can tell me what you’re talking about.

    Patricia, excellent! You get tonight’s gold star for providing useful instruction in one of the few magical workings that’s guaranteed to help the political situation just now: personal involvement in the political system.

    Jean-Vivien, yep. That’s the province of Saturn. Saturn is the planet of blowback, of consequences, of strict justice and debts both literal and metaphorical. The house where Saturn appears in your birth chart, especially if it’s there all by itself, is the part of your life where you get cut no slack at all, where you get the consequences of your actions served up cold without any wiggle room.

    Jim, my take is that Pluto functioned as a full-blown planet between 1930 and 2006. If you were born between those years, it’s active in your chart, and mundane charts cast during those years needed to take it into account. I also suggest that in the roughly thirty year period before its discovery, and in the roughly thirty-year period after its downgrading, it still has some effect. So the astrologers who wrote during that period were right to pay attention to it, and if you’re more than twelve years old, that Sun-Pluto opposition is worth paying attention to as well.

    I use Uranus and Neptune because they’re still planets — they’re big, larger than any other planets but Jupiter and Saturn, and thus can be expected to retain planetary status. Now that we’re in the diminuendo days of Pluto, though, I find that it doesn’t affect mundane charts significantly, and its role in personal charts seems to be muted unless you’ve got a strong aspect involving it (as you do, and I don’t).

    As for why Pluto took on planetary status for a while and then lost it — that’s a fascinating question, and one that requires careful discussion. The very, very short form is that it represents a transitory influence, very powerful for a time but not enduring, and people in the future will look on the Plutonian fixations and obsessions of the recent past with the same baffled incomprehension that we look on the fixations and obsessions of the Romantic era that Ceres ruled, during its period as a planetary force. More on this as we proceed!

    Oilman2, couldn’t get it to play on my elderly computer. Any chance your friend does things in written form?

  88. In 2016, I analyzed the Sun, Mars, and Moon positions For major candidates in every US presidential election in history. Btw, 4 were essentially uncontested. I discovered that, amongst others, no candidate with a Pisces Moon or Mars had ever won..Hillary has a Pisces moon, so I concluded she would lose….Most astrologers predicted she would win, using more sophisticated methods, but, in the words of a professional Astrologer I know, that was because they were leftist partisans…obviously, you are not a partisan…

  89. Hi JMG,

    I’m enjoying the comments, but feel a bit concerned about the conversations about Saturn, out of pure self interest: My second Saturn Return began last January, and ends roughly mid-October. Saturn, by itself, straddles the line between the 7th and 8th houses in my chart. I’m an Aquarius. I rely on AstoDienst for my information, and have no astrology chops whatsoever. My strong sense is Saturn is/will hold me to account, but if I cooperate in good faith this could be awesome in a good way. If I don’t, awesome in a bad way. Seem a reasonable assessment? Any advice?

    Thanks so much!

  90. Re: death spells for Trump & supporters

    Goodness, why not just work some positive spells for the good of the people or institutions they think Trump is harming, or even for the Democratic Party itself, which could certainly use the help? Not only would they avoid the nasty blowback attendant upon harmful spellwork, but they’d have less chance of ending up with the letter but not the spirit of their intentions fulfilled (Mike Pence in office being the most obvious possibility).

  91. Speaking of Syria, we have some more good news coming from President Trump. He announced plans to pull US military forces out of Syria in the very near future. No doubt there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth from the Dempublican and Republicrat establishments, much of it from supposedly progressive liberal Democrats.

    Indeed, Pravda on the Potomac is already waving the bloody shirt while accusing Trump of selling out to Iran. Gee, no surprises there…

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/two-coalition-personnel-killed-in-syria-as-trump-signals-possible-us-withdrawal/2018/03/30/4c589d54-33fb-11e8-9759-56e51591e250_story.html?utm_term=.6ec789229d55

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/josh-rogin/wp/2018/03/30/in-syria-we-took-the-oil-now-trump-wants-to-give-it-to-iran/?utm_term=.8973122e8320

  92. Another article about the revival of Roseanne, the success of which completely surprised the latte liberals and left them in shock. Among other things, the ratings have been through the roof in flyover country, while the show has been largely ignored in places like New York City and Los Angeles. It has been particularly popular with young people, many of whom weren’t even alive when the original series ran. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, the times they are a changin…

    http://deadline.com/2018/03/roseanne-revival-huge-ratings-premiere-stuns-hollywood-prompts-soul-searching-1202354973/

  94. I’d expect to see Mars or Uranus in some strong aspect to trigger the foundation chart Saturn when it actually, really does go kablooey,

    I wonder if this hasn’t already happened and it’s just developing slowly. Unless I’m misunderstanding something, Uranus (in the twelfth house) is in opposition to the foundation chart Saturn in the 2017 inauguration chart. (Also, Neptune is slow as molasses and the inconjunction is present even in that chart.) It’s in cadent houses, but that might be a point in favor of it triggering and just taking a while.

    (Also of interest: the inauguration chart’s Saturn is in the eighth house and trine Uranus, and in the “how much influence does Pluto still have?” department said dwarf planet is t-squaring the Uranus-foundation Saturn opposition.)

  95. @ CR Patiño

    My heart breaks at the suffering inflicted upon the people of your country. Many innocent lives are torn apart by the violence and greed.

    All the problems the US has with its southern border are a direct result of the relative poverty in Mexico. The only solution is to make Mexico a wealthier nation (or to make the US a poorer one… though no one would choose that willingly).

    It drives me nuts that the US wastes so much money in a trade deficit with China when we could be trading with Mexico instead, raising the wealth of your nation which in turn raises the security in ours. Unfortunately, our government is probably as corrupt as yours, neither is likely to address any of these problems in constructive ways, and many people will continue to suffer as a result. In the meantime, my thoughts and prayers are with all the innocent people in your country.

    Sincerely
    Jessi Thompson
    anotheramethyst

  96. Do you think that the coming Pluto return for the USA will not be very eventful then? Or maybe just closing a door/end of an era thing/over and done thing?

  97. In the UK it’s very fashionable for ‘Remainers’ to portray the ‘Brexiters ‘ as the failures, the bigoted, the white, the poor, the….. in other words…….working class (ugh, shudder). Poor dears they can’t help it, they’re racist and thick.

    If one is generalising, one can certainly point to a Brexit vote in the many depressed regions which were once heavily industrial and are no longer, or not much.

    So far, so Hillary.

    However, as a snapshot, people I have met who voted Brexit do not fit this template:

    A multi-millionaire retired hedge fund owner who froths at the mouth at the mention of Juncker and the Brussels bureaucrats.

    A successful Brazilian immigrant kitchen-fitter (they are very well-paid here).

    A lady of 80 who voted No in the first referendum and has just been waiting to get another chance.

    A successful middle-class antiquarian bookseller, with a German wife, who used to be a member of the Anti-Nazi League. Ditto, waiting his chance since the 1970’s……

    There are more, but the point is made: not one of them fits the template of ‘poor, stupid, white’, which the cool, largely urban Remainers adhere to. Like Hillary, they continue to throw these insults around.

  99. Hello, John M. Greer, I remember that back in the Well of Galabes, there was in the comments section a discussion about the Aries Ingress 2018. Your (or someone other’s) predictions then about the chart were more “apocalyptic” than now, where they are more sedate. Is this correct or am I missing sonething?

    Secondly, regarding Steve T.’s remark about going to war woth the Soviet Union: The Soviet Union doesn’t exist anymore, but Russia does, and its capital is Moscow, as in the Soviet Union. Keeping that in mind, the 2018 aries ingress chart doesn’t predict that the USA is involved in a new war, so it doesn’t matter for that one purpose if the Soviet Union still exists or not.

  100. “Onething, er, I’m trying to parse this. Perhaps you can tell me what you’re talking about.”

    Oh, dear. I was being a spelling nazi. Loose and lose are very often confused, and not without some logic as our crazy language is not exactly consistent in spelling.

  101. Responding to the main topic, specifically with regard to the economic condition of the United States: The fast crash thesis seems to be a variant of apocalyptic thinking in many cases, and in others probably a vague yet urgent feeling amplified by the anxiety, malaise and fear of our times. I do not think it will happen like this. But I think, in fact, that ‘it’ already happened to a certain extent. In 2008, there was a huge crash, and the echoes of that crash have been with us ever since. Though I didn’t see it at the time, it was a decisive turning point, just as 9/11. However, things seem to have stabilized somewhat, and reordered themselves at a lower and perhaps slightly more volatile level. This seems consistent, so far, with the catabolic collapse theory. I presume that we will see an extension of this situation for the rest of our lives. After all, the USA has a far way to fall in terms of material wealth before it will resemble the world that most of the human race lives in on a daily basis. And, what is more, a recovery or resurgence of sorts may even be possible. The gods know, many people out there are fed up with the current system, and some kind of latter-day Progressivism (in the sense of the post-Gilded Age movement) – or some other reform movement for that matter – may be on the horizon. Too early to say, of course. But it seems likely to be an exciting ride. The tremendous toll that 20th century civilization began to take on the biosphere precludes a long duration of economic growth, and with human birthrates now sinking worldwide, we seem to have entered the slide to a new dark age (in the most technical sense of the term that JMG likes to use). But this doesn’t mean there will not or could not be temporary upswings of fortune. Judging from trends we’ve seen so far, the rest of 21st century looks to be an interesting time.

  102. @Jen,
    but the whole opposition to Trump is totally negative and oppositional, and non-creative and non-productive. Look at the way they keep turning to tired, old establishment candidates to carry the banner. My goodness, one SJW I overheard at a party thought it was a brilliant idea to run Biden w/Obama as veep. Certainly, they’re not going to be thinking of anything positive or productive in their magic, either.

  103. Booklover,

    My point was that the closer in time you are to the ingress, the better you will be able to know what it ia talking about. I mentioned the Soviet Union because it seems likely that an astrologer in 1950 would not know that it had collapsed, and thus might factor it into his predictions. A similar astrologer in 1913 would probably not know it had ever existed, and might wonder what the chart meant for US relations with the Russian Empire– or foe that matter Austria-Hungary.

  104. Aleph-Anon has put it very well – many people, who on an intellectual level know that there will be no apocalypse are still waiting for a distruptive, apocalypse-like event, because the present epoch looks so volatile with so many things which, as is assumed, cannot go on. I myself wasn’t totally exempt from this. But now, belatedly, I propose a Black Swan event, which consists in nothing very extraordinary or very distruptive happening at all. In other words, contrary to expectations, no crisis might happen at all in the near future.

  105. Along the lines of a mesh between astrology and ecology, what do you think of Randall Carlson’s cycles of catastrophe, according to The Great Year? The great year is about 26,000 years, the length of earth’s axial precession, as I’m sure you know. But he says if you divide the Great Year into seasons, the earth’s major catastrophes mainly fall on the equinoxes and the solstices of the Great Year. He says we are moving into the start of a new Great Year now (Spring Equinox, I think – not the normal earth’s spring equinox which we just had but the Great Year’s Spring Equinox). I think the start of the Great Year might also be correlated with the New Age ideas about the Dawn of Aquarius, but I’m not sure.

    As to developing an astrological chart for the earth itself, and its ecological conditions, I can’t imagine anyone more qualified than you.

  106. Pyrrhus, fascinating! Thanks for this.

    OtterGirl, a lot depends on where Saturn is in your birth chart and how it relates to the other planets, but as a general rule, yes, you’ve sketched out the basic rule. A Saturn return doesn’t have to be hard, unless you have an overdeveloped sense of entitlement (i.e., too much Jupiter)!

    Jen, thank you. You’ve just earned today’s gold star with an honorary wizard’s hat, for expressing perfect common sense about the right way to do magic.

    Felix, dear gods, I hope he does it. The single most useful thing we could do right now as a nation is bring our troops home and ditch our imploding empire before it finishes the job of bankrupting us. As for the Roseanne remake, that doesn’t surprise me at all. I wonder how long it’s going to take before the bicoastal Boomer bubble gets around to noticing that most of the rest of the country is no longer listening…

    Patricia, relax. Do you happen to know what house Saturn is in in your natal chart? That’ll tell you how that strong, uncompromising Saturn in Aries energy expresses itself in your life — and it may express itself in positive ways. Saturn’s energy is difficult, but if you learn to move with it, it’s an immense source of strength, self-discipline, focus, and purpose.

    Username, I’m trying to figure out what you’re talking about when you mention a 2017 inauguration chart, because what you’re describing doesn’t match the 2017 ingress chart at all — in that latter chart, Uranus is in the first house, which is hardly cadent, and it’s too far out of orb to make an opposition to the foundation chart Saturn. Perhaps you can clarify.

    Just Me, I expect it to involve fairly modest effects, except to the extent that Pluto in its return aspects other, more significant planets.

    Xabier, the same is true of the Brits I know who voted Leave. The class bigotries of the privileged, though, are hard to shake…

    Dashui, thanks for this. I apparently have a fairly large readership among preppers, which pleases me — like’ em or not, the preppers out there deserve much respect, since they’re at least willing to take personal action in response to a troubled future, which is the one indispensable step so many aren’t willing to take.

    Booklover, I don’t do apocalypse. At the time — when I was somewhat less informed about mundane astrology than I am now — I saw the Mars-Saturn conjunction on the seventh house cusp as a sign of impending war; that was inaccurate, and I’ve adjusted my analysis accordingly.

    Onething, okay, fair enough. No question, English is a complete mess as a language!

    Aleph-Anon, exactly. Exactly! A long descent is entirely compatible with shorter periods of stabilization and even improvement — and in fact I’ve been talking about this for years. If you look at other civilizations that have gone down the same chute we’re experiencing now, you’ll see exactly that rhythm of partial collapse, stabilization at a lower level, some degree of recovery, and then another lurch downward. It takes many cycles of this, at many fractal scales before the civilization bottoms out in a dark age.

    Skylight, he’s off on his precessional sequence. The spring equinox of the Great Year happened just over 2000 years ago, when the age of Aries gave way to that of Pisces — it’s the Pisces-Aries cusp where the ordinary spring equinox takes place, after all. The Pisces-Aquarius transition happened, by my calculation, right around 1879 — look at the way that Neptunian themes in avant-garde culture gave way to Uranian ones at that time — and we’re now more than a century into the Aquarian age. So I wouldn’t worry about it.

  107. @JMG & all…

    Yes, he does written. I thought you might find the year-long animation of outer planet aspects and such interesting. It moves slowly with a full year involved, and you just may need to let it load all the way. It’s a demo – not interactive except for stop and go click on image.

    If not, then maybe others might find it interesting, since outer planet aspects supposed influences are planetary. His site is astroecon.com and he has an email link.

    I was imagining this might be a decent tool, but have no idea what Bob plans to do with it.

  108. @ Xabier…

    So, might one say that British “Brexiteers aka Deplorables” are no more uniform than those within my country? Which includes millionaires and doctors and plumbers and farmers as well…

  109. @ Jen…

    I second JMG’s opinion of your recommendation. Negativity is not something to be pursued when avoidable. Hate is inefficient and requires much more energy than it’s opposite.

  111. JMG: “I wonder how long it’s going to take before the bicoastal Boomer bubble gets around to noticing that most of the rest of the country is no longer listening…”

    Actually, I think they’ve started to notice. Their response has been to begin openly positing that White Males are what’s wrong with this nation – in short, doubling down on their abandonment of the Flyover zones.

  112. Thanks for the clarification, JMG! I already do know that you don’t believe in apocalypses, and for good reason (the data from historical records, among others).

  113. Steve T, the example about Russia and the Soviet Union was an example, where the result of predictiong a chart in the far future didn’t matter much; but there are other examples possible, where an entity for which one casts an ingress chart completely ceases to exist, or relocates its capital city, like Germany after 1990, so that ingress charts dates far in the future could use the wrong locations.

  114. Saturn in Aries in the 3rd house.

    Amusingly enough for someone whose major skills are verbal, Gemini Moon in the 5th house and Mercury in Sagittarius in the 11th house. Mars in Scorpio in the 9th – a difficult chart for a difficult person.

  115. Hi JMG,

    Thanks for your thoughtful response to my question…I was concerned that I might be drifting too far afield from the main thrust of the post. Much appreciated and very thought provoking.

    Apparently there’s serious debate going on in the astronomical science community about restoring Pluto’s planet status (https://www.voanews.com/a/mht-nasa-scientists-urge-for-pluto-to-regain-planet-status/3733582.html)! Although if the new criteria is accepted there will be over 100 planets…Ceres will be back in business too! Even if a new planet status standard only plays out as a temporary transitory influence it would seem virtually impossible to incorporate in to astrology as we know it. It’s unfathomably complex enough with twelve signs and houses, nine (or ten) planets and the vast multiplicity of aspects, points etc.

    It’s fascinating to think of the Ceres influence with respect to the “fixations and obsessions of the Romantic era that Ceres ruled”. The music, literature, fine arts, popular culture…I get it! The same goes for the waning Plutonian era. I’m so looking forward to your further thoughts on the rise and fall of Pluto if that’s within the purview of “more on this as we proceed”.

    Jim

  116. I just got around to watching the new Roseanne—I gave it a C+. They tried to cram too many current issues into the available time. But I did laugh several times.

  117. Hi John Michael,

    That’s funny! Down here they say that if you don’t enjoy the weather, wait for a few hours and it will surely change. 😀 Mate, I hear you!

    This is a bit off topic and so please indulge me in this instance, because it is more or less relevant to the overall discussion. Yesterday, I began reading the ‘Limits to Growth’ first edition paperback which was loaned to me. I’m a bit nervous about damaging the delicate paper which is showing its age, as are my precious pulp science fiction books from about the same time. Sorry, I digress.

    They nailed the population figure of 7 billion. Wow. I was floored by that. Anyway, the book pre-dates me and the tone of the book is fascinating. It is beautifully written and easy to understand, but also written in a highly objective and informative style as if I were being lectured at. And I feel that the authors intent, which I can never really know, was that if they sounded the alarm in time, then all will be well and good. It is quite chilling to read from that perspective.

    I learned an interesting concept from the book and that was that bringing on additional land into productive use maybe something that we cannot afford to do as the costs may exceed the benefits. I’ve often remarked that much of the things that I do here make no economic sense, and people always seem to be perplexed by that observation – and then I can see that they do not believe me. So, it was interesting to read such a concept so beautifully explained. I may write about that on Monday.

    Oh, the local Green Wizards group met last week to discuss the awful issues of money and property and the audio of this discussion is available as an mp3 file to either listen to directly from the website or for download. You can find it here at my podcast website: Green Wizards recent discussion regarding Money and Property. We spoke for over two hours, so a lot of ground was covered and the group is a very lively and delightful group of chance companions! Enjoy!

    Cheers

    Chris

  118. @ Godozo/JMG re:bicoastal bubbles

    I honestly think you can pass the whole thing off on national media. They are owned and run and staffed by some persons of high privilege. They typically live in local bubbles. There was a housing affordability map I saw today, and the DC-NY corridor, most of southern Cali and all of FL were unaffordable for anyone earning less than $40k/yr.

    I think the problem is they are both living in and working within echo chambers connected via fiberoptic cables. Perhaps that is why FL housing is so high – the eastern seaboard elites evacuate south?

    I think if they were paying attention to their TV ratings they might get a clue, but it seriously looks like they don’t care and will not until their ad revenue drops enough that they feel a pinch. They may not even care then, if said owners need a tax write-off.

    Remember, this is the bunch that never saw anything but Hillary winning. And many still refuse to examine the actual reason why many would never support her.

    And JMG, is it strictly Boomers involved in this? Or is it bubble people?

  119. Oilman2, fair enough. I’ll see if I can find time to watch it on the less outdated computers in the local public library.

    Bruno, the Age of Capricorn, of course! The precessional cycle goes backwards through the zodiac; each age takes 2,160 years, for a total duration of 25,920 years for the full cycle.

    Godozo, okay, so they’re in denial. We’ve got four more stages ahead before acceptance finally shows up…

    Booklover, thank you.

    Patricia, so Aquarius rising? That makes a lot of sense. Saturn in Aries in the 3rd makes you strong-willed, stubborn, and resolute — nobody can make you do something you’ve decided you don’t want to do. You have a strong argumentative streak, and you ran into a lot of troubles and sorrows of various kinds in the first half of your life. Your time in school was probably full of difficulties, and if you had siblings, you probably didn’t get along well with them at all. Depression and anxiety were issues for you when you were young; now that you’re older, things are less difficult for you, and the strength of will and capacity for discipline and focus you developed through the difficulties of your youth now stand you in good stead. Am I right?

    Jim, if we get over a hundred planets astrology will be practically unworkable — it’s hard enough to correlate two luminaries, seven planets, twelve signs, and twelve houses! Yes, we’ll be getting to the cultural impact of Pluto — that’s one of the most interesting things about its time as a planet.

    Chris, I had the chance several years ago to talk to Dennis Meadows at a peak oil event. He and the other people who wrote The Limits to Growth took it for granted that once people realized what kind of a mess we were facing, of course they’d do the smart thing and change industrial society’s course. The thought that people would close their eyes and run face first into the brick wall of the future — that was something they never dreamed of.

    Oilman2, it’s not just the Boomers, but the Boomer mentality dominates the bicoastal bubble. The political class these days is older than it’s ever been, as the Boomer generation desperately tries to cling to power — our presidential candidates in the 2016 election were the oldest in history, and all of them were Boomers. When that generation finally loses its grip on the levers of power, a lot of things are going to change very quickly indeed.

  120. Chris @ Fernglade…

    I read it (LtG) long ago, and it stayed with me because the population was ratcheting up per predictions, along with much else they envisioned. The truth is that when the oil beast finally gets tired enough, those limits will hit pretty hard, but not all at once, most likely. That we cannot retain the same carrying capacity without oil is a given – so what to do when agriculture for a family is a year round endeavor?

    Fortunately, the unwinding is likely to be slower than many expect, because both people and the current system are wanting to continue. JMG has spoken and written volumes on this.

    At my farm, we are trying to put things in (trees, water resources, stone buildings, etc.) that will last more than a generation or two. It takes time, but it’s also fun and interesting to plan and map it out, imagining no electricity and gasoline being expensive. To that end, we are currently looking at buying a Percheron next year, once the pasture is fully fenced. I need my son comfortable with draft horses, so he can pass that along.

    I think you are right about the tone of LtG – it seems that they assumed the message was strong enough. They didn’t do much looking at history of human behavior, or else assumed we would do something different this time, since we have so much knowledge at hand. Inertia is always trouble for humans.

    I don’t think we will see more land coming into production for the reason you gleaned from the book. I believe we will see massive amounts of land go fallow due to infertile soil from chemical agriculture used for decades in the same fields. It will take a long time for that soil to recover. In other areas, just keeping land clear of weeds and saplings will be very labor intensive – so food will become more valuable and have more meaning for people than today.

    I doubt I will see that, but I can envision it. And so the farm escapades of building to last continue here in Texas…

  121. Trump and his supporters seem to be returning the favor by doing everything in their power to push the bicoastal Boomer elite out of the nation and widening the divide. They seem to be playing right into his hands…

  122. Regarding Saturn: my natal Saturn is retrograde in Aquarius in house 3. So, if I have this Saturn thing right, that would mean I have some difficulties in areas of communication and also possibly travel? I guess that would fit with what my experience has been, being generally shy and not having been that comfortable learning to drive. Does it make a difference that it’s retrograde?

    On the thing with the Russians – I know the actual incident occurred in the previous period. I guess I was more thinking that some of the potential consequences might be occurring in this new period, but fair enough. 😉

  123. JMG…

    I am ready for that last statement to be true. I actually think it’s more of an “old man” thing than a boomer thing though. As I rapidly approach “oldmanhood”, the lessons learned are many. I do notice others ahead of me becoming extremely cautious in their endeavors, and trying to hold on to everything they can in the way of ‘stuff’ and authority.

    Authority is always given or allowed anyway.

    Stuff doesn’t go with any of us on that last walk.

    I guess they cling out of fear of several things, because most are filthy rich and haven’t needed to work in a long time.

    As it is the weekend and we are far along in comments, what do you imagine as general changes within the body politic as the old guard slips into the mists? Myself, I am thinking that the 2 parties we have now must vanish or be reformed in some way, and a third enter the arena.

  124. You will probably say that I wrong. Probably laugh out loud reading this. But, I am almost of the suspicion that there really are Lost Civilizations that rose and fell before Bishop Usher claims the world itself was created, back in 4004 BC. Still, it is very strange that the Darwin types dogmatically insist that Civilization is no older than Bible Literalists claim the world is. After all, if Modern Homo Sapiens is around 900,000 years old one really cannot completely rule out the possibility that Civilization as such, is that Ancient as well.

    Mind you, I know what you will say. You will tell me that the burden of proof is on me. Still, call it intuition, but I believe, if I am not too mistaken, that History is Cyclical. As such, Civilizations come into existence, and they disappear over the course of Millennia. Besides, this could, indeed, be one of the things that the Early Christians endeavored to erase from History, when they burnt down the Library at Alexandria, all those years ago. Indeed, much like there was the conception of Unperson’s in Orwell’s book, is it too hard to imagine entire Unsocieties? I wonder about precisely that.

    Besides, the Linear View of History does lead to Apocalyptic mindsets: whether of the Christian or Communist or National Socialist varieties. I will be happy to read replies to this idea. After all, I think it is a most fascinating conception– especially if Archaeologists and Historians eventually have to concede that we do not know, nor may ever know, precisely when the first cities were built at all.

  125. Archdruid,

    Sorry that was meant to read “which sign, in which house tell and astrologer that it’s the end of the world?”

    Answer: when the sun is in their house…

    BAWHAHHAHAH…Ahem, sorry carry on.

    Regards,

    Varun

  126. @Oilman2
    Re: Predictions

    As you’ve probably gathered, I prefer to do intermediate-term predictions using the 80-year cycle in light of what Michael says is coming down the pike. According to that, we’re currently in a Crisis period, and the next period up is a Stability period. (Strauss and Howe call this a High and Xenakis calls this an Austerity for reasons that make sense to them. I use Michael’s terminology, for reasons that will become apparent.)

    Crisis periods normally include a major financial disaster followed a few years later by a Crisis War. We’ve had the financial disaster, and the “crisis war” doesn’t always have to involve fighting – the breakup of the Soviet Union is the obvious example of a Crisis period that didn’t involve a shooting war.

    I think in our case the “crisis war” was the 2016 election.

    The Crisis period ends and the Stability period begins when the Idealist/Prophet generation (that is the Boomers) ages off the scene and is replaced by the next generation (Generation X). The focus of a Stability period is, as the name suggests, stability. The people in power are extremely pragmatic in creating and ensuring stability, and don’t always follow the rule of law in doing so.

    The next Stability may not look all that stable: the dance is over and the piper is presenting the bill.

    The following is from Michael’s State of the Planet (via Troy Tolley) at the beginning of 2018:

    – – – excerpt begins, edited to remove Michael Teachings jargon – – –

    2018 brings with it a State of the Planet that is leading toward global unification, “one way or the other.”

    – – snip – –

    [U]nification could come in the form of a common enemy, common challenge, common crisis, common ground, common enlightenment, etc. At this point the patterns seem to point to common enemy or crisis.

    – – – snip – – –

    The top 5 common enemy or crisis scenarios are in no particular order:

    CLIMATE – food shortages, diseased supplies, drought, fire, flood, extreme weather, heat waves, water shortages, etc.
    WAR – Russia successfully exploits the weaknesses and fears of tyrannical or trusting nations.
    NON-TERRESTRIAL EVENT – discovery and proof of non-terrestrial life; intelligent contact with non-terrestrial life; indisputable evidence of off-planet technology.
    POWER OUTAGE – catastrophic outages of energy supplies in the form of fuel or electricity in large geographical locations and over great lengths of time; and
    CRISIS OF CONSCIOUSNESS – a mass shift away from irresponsible consumption and defenses and a wave of surrender to a Greater Good.

    – – – snip – – –

    The “walls” toward which humanity is “driving” at such high speed are the walls of Energy Resource, Consumption, Waste Management, Climate and Environment, Information Management, Social Intelligence, and Diet.

    Each of these categories have a “wall” that will be hit in 2020.

    This is not a doomsday scenario we describe, and your 2018 and 2019 and 2020 may look like any other year at the time, but they look different from the future. They are the years that made the difference.

    – – – excerpt ends – – –

    That last sentence may look a bit weird until you realize that Michael is speaking from the mid-Causal plane (using the Theosophical definitions) and sees time on the Physical Plane in very different terms that we do.

  128. Oilman2 – I’ve been on 2-hour trips through the back roads of northern Florida. If you have to earn $40K/year to even get a house, who is living in all those rural hamlets whose “shopping centers” are one each evangelical church and Dollar Tree?

    Or did the chart only look at the cities?

  129. John: you called it on the nose, except that it’s Capricorn sun and Capricorn rising – only in the 12th house!! I gather that means a lot of introversion – no duh!

  130. Twin Ruler – very early lost civilizations don’t even need a conspiracy theory to explain why all record of them was lost. Plain old Dark Ages, and ruins covered by time, tides, erosion, etc, would do the rest. Especially if they worked in wood a lot rather than stone.

  131. Correction! Capricorn sun in the 12th house, Capricorn rising shown at 23 degrees 04 minutes. Pluto in Leo, a.k.a. “Wannabe Boomer.”

    And talk about stubborn – my mind wouldn’t rest until I dug out both the chart, and the interpretation in the back of my astrology course notes. Interrupted Easter* dinner to do so!

    But then, in my Seeker days, I went on a spirit quest to find the animal which best represents the Younger (pre-rational) self and came up Badger. In protesting to my friends that Mole would be more to the point, they hooted me down and declared that Badger was a perfect fit.

    *so I’m Wiccan. Consistency be hanged.

  132. @Patricia Mathews–First Full Moon after the vernal equinox, everybody wants to party. If a few of your close relatives were Jewish, you would have had a very busy weekend.

  133. regarding paragraph six

    “Okay, one other thing. Nobody knows what makes astrology work. It’s a feeble and pigheaded excuse for rationality to insist that an effect can’t happen if its cause isn’t known—and when a scientist says “There’s nothing that can cause that effect,” what he or she actually means, of course, is “we don’t know of anything that can cause that effect.” In the kind of old-fashioned occult philosophy I favor, the working theory is that there’s a subtle something-or-other that seems to be related to biological life, which fills the solar system (at least), and in which planetary movements relative to the Sun, the Earth, the Moon, and the other planets set up complicated patterns of resonance that affect living things here on Earth. Is that true? Heck if I know, but it does seem to explain the observed phenomena tolerably well.”

    Being a man of few words, and a “master of none”… that bit rang my bell. Just look back at history and see how many times accepted fact has been turned on its head, and how often those turnings have been led by those with an intuitive sense shouting at them “hey, there’s something going on here that doesn’t fit.”

    That those adept at intuition fail often, and spectacularly -but- let’s not forget the spectacular wins from the other side. Plenty of examples of both if you keep your eyes open. It’s not an endeavor for “fence straddlers”.

  134. just a few more words, a bit of an aside, and sorry for the double post:

    Intuitive sense defined as the ability to collate sensory and anecdotal data that stands in opposition to currently accepted norms. Typically dismissed, at first; and rarely recorded or rewarded (with some grand exceptions in history).

    ttfn and thanks again for another thought provoking post.

    I’ll keep whispering from the wilderness.

  135. Hi John Michael,

    That would have been a very cool experience. You were very lucky to have had the chance to have had a chat with Dennis Meadows. I assume that he was on board with the concept of Peak Oil or did he speak about the larger picture and talk about Peak Everything? The book even covers the consequences of releasing too much Carbon Dioxide into the atmosphere – and interestingly the authors chose the mature approach of professing that they do not know the outcome or tolerances of the ability of the environment to accommodate pollution. Hasn’t the tone of science changed a lot in the intervening years?

    Maybe it is my profession, but I have observed in the human sphere that failure is always an option, even when the failure runs counter to a persons prevailing belief system.

    Thanks for allowing the digression. The book is moving, but to me it reads like a text book. Mr Catton Jr’s book affected me far more deeply because he dealt with the human side of the story and left little wriggle room. What is your take on that observation?

    Cheers

    Chris

  136. Hi Oilman2,

    Thanks for the courteous reply and you appear to be doing some good work. Well done. And also respect for doing so.

    I’m clearly a bit younger than you, so I’m not so sanguine that I’m going to avoid the worst that the future has to offer me. My life has been interrupted at times by economic events and policies which sought to push costs onto younger folks whilst avoiding costs for older folks and whilst I understand the reasons, well, I still felt the pain.

    Some bloke remarked once about ‘do unto others’ and he seemed to be a pretty wise bloke.

    Cheers

    Chris

  137. I’m trying to figure out what you’re talking about when you mention a 2017 inauguration chart, because what you’re describing doesn’t match the 2017 ingress chart at all — in that latter chart, Uranus is in the first house, which is hardly cadent, and it’s too far out of orb to make an opposition to the foundation chart Saturn. Perhaps you can clarify.

    It’s fairly simple: IIRC you’ve mentioned that one can cast a mundane chart for the coronation of a monarch and it will reflect how their reign will go (you used the example of John Dee). I was applying that idea to Presidential inaugurations – so, a chart cast for Washington DC at the moment of the inauguration (January 20, 2017). It might not work; I’m still rather a novice.

    More generally, it looks like Uranus moved into opposition with the foundation chart Saturn quite a while back and moved out somewhere between the inauguration and last year’s Aries ingress. The 2016 Aries ingress definitely had it, though in that case foundation Saturn’s on the 10th/11th cusp and Uranus is on the 4th/5th cusp. (Even if that particular potential didn’t get triggered, that might explain something about the rhetoric of the last couple of years!)

  138. Twin Ruler,

    I am certainly not laughing. The evidence for prior civilizations is actually pretty vast. Even the Bible hints that something big occurred a few thousand years ago. I even know one fringe Christian group who believes this. A closer reading of Genesis reveals that it says that the earth had BECOME a void, and Adam and Eve were told to be fruitful and REPLENISH the earth.
    Since we are in an ice age for the past 1-3 million years, with the cyclical glaciations, the coastlines of earth, which is where humans like to live, have gone up and down. That which was coastline during the glacial periods is now off the coasts. But as you probably are aware, there are several sites that look like they were man made millennia ago.

    If you look at earth history, there have been several catastrophes and extinction events. Even they are roughly cyclical. The last big event was indeed not long ago. At the end of this last glaciation, North America lost 23 species, including elephants, horses, camels, the saber tooth, the giant ground sloth and more. There appears to have been a prior event more local, perhaps a supervolcano, that caused a massive die off of the humans, who were then replaced, perhaps by roughly similar groups from outside the area.

    I have also noticed the odd similarity between mainstream science / Darwinism, and biblical interpretations of history. One reason I think is that they have not grown since the 1800s and are of a similar mindset. It’s more an argument against God or spirituality than a real search for truth.

  139. I’m fascinated by the contrast between the short term economic optimism that underlies this reading and what I’ve been observing happening pretty much since the year began. It’s been looking like we’ve been in a significant economic plunge driven by collapses in the technology sector and investors being forced to show their hands regarding just how much money’s been wrapped up in free trade fantasies. I’m reminded of the narrative disconnect regarding the economy over the last several years, when the official narrative said we were experiencing the biggest economic boom since the 1980s, but among the general public the general attitude was that the recession had never ended and the so-called recovery was nowhere to be found. I wonder if some of what this chart is pointing at is a reversal of that phenomenon in which one set of voices is insisting the economy has crashed and calling for action while another, much larger set of voices is breathing a sigh of relief. Astrology is still a fascinating, but largely opaque field of thought to me, so I wouldn’t know where to begin to look for that sort of disconnect in the realities experienced by the elites versus the populace or if such a thing is indicated, but it makes sense that we could over the next few months hear that the world is ending from economists against a public attitude that things are finally looking up, and it would be an interesting twist from the specific flavor of reality disconnect we’ve seen of late. Could that be part of what the positioning of Neptune is pointing towards?

  140. Okay, that is an extremely messy Cancer ingress. Looks like the deep end, and I’m rather new to anything astrology-related.

    I’mma jump in.

    For all the clutter, the point that jumps out to me the most from the Cancer ingress is Jupiter. Retrograde in the fifth house (both statements that apply to this Aries ingress too) in a grand trine with Mercury and Neptune and square opposition Mars and Venus. (For a second I misread Scorpio as Pisces, adding to the fun.) Jupiter (rules, among other things, wealth) retrograde in the fifth house (gambling) trine Mercury (trade, commerce) in the first house (general prosperity) and Neptune (delusion) retrograde at the midheaven (in Pisces, no less)… yeah, that looks like a speculative bubble all right, probably the cryptocurrency analogue to 1999 or 2008. Square Mars and Venus… I wonder if the most relevant thing here is the association of those two planets with men and women.

    Actually, no, maybe the Moon should have stood out to me first – I missed the squares the first time I looked at it. (That’s what twigged me to the foundational chart connections). Trine Mars, sextile conjunct Venus/North Node, square Mercury and Saturn (but those two aren’t in opposition). Conjunct the foundation chart’s Saturn as noted before. That might mean the current men/women issues get resolved in favor of men

    Sun conjunct ascendant and the Gemini/Cancer cusp (borderline) opposition retrograde Saturn in Capricorn conjunct the descendant. Also sextile? Uranus, and interestingly I think the Cancer ingress’s Sun is conjunct Trump’s natal Sun (I checked because Trump’s personality reminds me of both Gemini and Cancer descriptions, and yup).

    Saturn’s worth noting in and of itself and might actually be the most important – the planet of restriction and limits, retrograde, in its rulership, conjunct the descendant, opposite the Sun (and Trump’s natal Sun), square the Moon, trine Uranus, square the foundational Saturn. That’s unlikely to mean good things for the US.

    Uranus shifting into Taurus from Aries also seems potentially noteworthy, given that apparently the last time that happened was the 1930s.

    Overall, this chart seems to split into four big themes and a few other aspects: two sextile-trine-opposition setups (Sun-Saturn-Uranus, Moon-Venus-Mars), a t-square (Mars-Venus-Jupiter), a grand trine (Neptune-Mercury-Jupiter), the Moon’s two squares (Mercury and Saturn), and two inconjuncts (Moon-Neptune, Venus-Saturn).

    A few predictions (we’ll see if I’m right):
    – A speculative bubble (or possibly war spending depending on how Mars/Saturn plays the next three months – if I’m right in reading Trump as wanting the adulation of the people his incentives push towards war, and a war in North Korea or the Middle East morphing into a proxy war between the United States and Russia-China is plausible) pushed by the media and with popular support. I’m not sure whether it will pop in the three months of the Cancer ingress, but when it does it’s going to do a number on the nation’s finances – Jupiter is square both of the money houses.
    – Further popular distrust of the media.
    – The resolution of #MeToo, likely in a manner unfavorable to women (trine vs. sextile, and some of the symbolism I’ve seen floated for the North and South Nodes [conjunct Venus/Mars respectively] would suggest a shift away from femininity towards masculinity).
    – A very hostile foreign policy environment with the nation running into limits – it’s not out of the question that the dollar loses reserve currency status during the Cancer ingress (if so, it’ll get papered over for a little while by the speculative bubble).
    – Something major going down re: Trump. I’m having a hard time telling what – could be anything from Trump bypassing Constitutional restrictions with Congressional support (Uranus in the 11th) and going full farce Mussolini to Trump’s Presidency ending prematurely (though he doesn’t have Saturn in the 10th) to Twilight’s Last Gleaming and something Trump-related in the surrender terms. (One of the more plausible scenarios is Trump firing Mueller* and suffering no domestic consequences in spite of the Nixon precedent but damaging democracy’s credibility abroad. Another is Trump straight-up dying in office of natural causes.) Regardless of what happens, I doubt it’s going to be good for the American people, and I wouldn’t surprised if it’s another blow to the legitimacy of the American system on top of the one delivered by the eclipse (by my read, that prediction panned out, but the religion affected was the American civil religion and the new religious movement was Social Justice).

    * – I’m dubious about Russiagate in general** – it reminds me of Whitewater – but I consider “the President can’t just fire the person investigating him” an important firewall (Schelling fence, to grab a useful term from the ratsphere).
    ** – Though admittedly “the American imperial armature would be out to get Trump no matter what he did” and “Trump’s actions re: Russia passed the espionage threshold” being simultaneously true would fit the tenor of the age…

  141. Onething– yes, I agree! The Darwin people merely desire to reassure themselves that God does not exist. I realize that now. Richard Dawkins is particularly annoying, in this regard. Best thing that ever happened to me was when I began to believe in God again. I am really excited about the possibility of finding more and more ancient Civilizations, that rose and fell long before recorded History.

    It is really exciting to think about all the possibilities at hand. Of course, America was not founded as a Christian Nation. For, it never was ever really either Christian or a National State, in any meaningful sense of such terms. The Founders, after all, were Deists. Now, the Deists actually rejected any form of revealed and scriptural religions at all. Deism, of course, is Freemason!

    I am going to seek knowledge however I can. Perhaps, just perhaps, I will become an Historical Investigator. In this way, I can learn a whole lot about reality. Modern Humankind, I would suspect, for most of its existence actually did live in some form of cities, one way or another. Take enough time, and even stone shall erode forever. I even wonder, if Industrial Civilization will even be remembered 1,000 years hence?

    It is so exciting to receive feedback about this, in any event. One book, I loved was “The Ten Commandments of Propaganda.” There is something rather liberating about their idea that most of what passes for History is the Propaganda of one side or the other. Yes, I will never be as incorrigibly gullible again, as I have been when I was younger.

  142. JMG,
    you really should read the Hollywood Reporter article I linked to, it’s indicative that the country is headed in the direction you think it should be going. Wanda Sykes, who is a black lesbian, and had some very choice words for Trump supporters after the election, is working on the new Roseanne, and she mentions how important it is to show “white people struggling”, and they mention the importance of having the black character not be “the black character”, but just another character, which is about as far from SJW antics as you can get. Very interesting trends.

  143. @Eric,
    perhaps the trade war w/China now heating up is just what the doctor ordered? (Clasps hands) This is so exciting! It’s been free trade all my given life, and I never remember tariffs being increased. West coast ports being idled may be just the push California needs to exit the Union!

  144. It may still be a few years before Dems get a clue, if Amy McGrath, our local upstart Dem primary candidate, is representative of the new “challengers”. A woman fighter pilot is all she seems to be running on. At least Jim Gray is already out of the closet, unlike his challenger. Sigh…
    https://www.amymcgrathforcongress.com/

  145. Speaking of predictions, I claim partial credit for mine from the beginning of the year; where I guessed that a formerly progressive celebrity would become the scandal of the week for defending Trump. I hammed up the prediction as written as used Tom Hanks as an example, and delving into absurd details, but I think the current return to fame of Roseanne, who when I was a kid was thought of as a relativly progressive feminist and friend to the Clintons, fits the bill for partial credit. If you are feeling too much optimism about the human condition for your comfort I suggest the comment section of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXxvJr98dd8 this youtube video as a through cure; the video itself should be paused before the comercial ends, and is simply unpleasant by my tastes. Sincerely though the dog piling of hatred is strange. It is as though there were a hidden leftwing conspiracy to alienate any moderate or free thinking person from their way of thinking. I thought of myself as a liberal as a matter of habit for years, it is strange to obseve by emotional tribal aspect grunting as a member of the Trumpish side, despite my rational minds decision to stay away from the dumpster fires both to my left and to my right… the beast in me is infatuated with the Trumpists, very strange, though I think it is mostly motivated by a feeling of having been betrayed in some way by the left. Feeling betrayed does a big number on how that aspect relates to the world.

    Wouldn’t it be a hoot if some consequence of the Roseanne tempist in a teapot got out and became the big bad black swan? If I may follow that up, may I ask, has anything yet come to pass, which you think is a canidate for the Black Swan that took so prominent of a roll in the new years prediction, or as come into view as a black shape or the horizon that could turn out to be a black swan but was unguessabe four months ago. I would say the closest in my mind would be the Facebook matter, if that situation flares up enough to destroy FAcebooks present roll in our culture that would be a big bird.

    Forgive those tangets shallow connection to this post I beg. More related, This weeks forecasts, especially with the short time frame, seem… ominiously positive. As in, generally pleasant, but noticably short lasting. I do hope this will continue with an update in three months. I find your astrological writing to be very good reading. I think the details in the already posted comments guessing and interpreting how the things indicated by this reading might or might not manifest already cover the ground that comes naturally to mind for me.

  146. @ Patricia Matthews…

    It was averaged, which makes sense, because anything near a beach is massively developed. I was down there about 5 years ago drilling near the Everglades – and you are right. A few miles from our drilling site there were people living in fishing shacks on stilts and they were not designer buildings. There are ‘poverty pockets’ there and in the panhandle and other spots. But most of the state is highly developed and the cost to live there is horrendous relative to income.

    @ John Roth…

    My feeling is that if sun output continues to decline, then we are looking at something planet-wide. It will be worse due to the consequences of how we live – just-in-time stocks, internet everything, mono-culture farming, etc. Everybody is specialized within the gears of globalism.

    Climate change is looking a much more apt expression of what we ought to expect, but if one looks at the primary energy source for our solar system, it is declining. In turn, our magnetosphere is declining, and pole wandering increasing. Recent changes in theories regarding the transitions in the past are leaning towards a more catastrophic scenario, from several sciences (geology, biology, archeology, etc.). The reasons for this shift in theory is simply new information – so it takes me back to the 1970’s, when people were predicting a new ice age coming. As usual, prediction was premature and likely overdone, but the solar output is falling and there is no denying that and attendant consequences hitting in the next decade.

    I see that as a possible unifying force. However, we are still culturally divided and ideologically divided across the planet. I don’t see humans suddenly uniting and singing ‘kumbaya’ anytime soon, regardless of us Boomers going back to the mud.

    I am also of the opinion that history shows that we continue down a successful path until it is no longer feasible to do so. It isn’t a conscious thing, but simply reaching limits of the current way of doing things. So I don’t see a crisis of conscience occurring until it is a consequence of striking limits of some form or other. I view it as consequence, not cause.

    I think that ET’s are unlikely to be interested in us, and the likelihood of them being alive concurrent with our species in the timeline is unlikely. Further, the distances required to travel would entail a complete revision of all physics, not just some of it. I view the ET thing as a possible false flag used to corral people into doing things they would not normally accede to – because that tech has been out of the barn for over a decade. The tech that can fool hundreds of thousands into believing in ET because they “saw it with their own eyes”.

    I don’t think we are alone in the universe, but the vastness of it is just incomprehensible to most people. When you add time into the mix, what are the chances that we are around within the same period of existence of another nearby species? That is conveniently left out of most musings regarding ET’s.

    Finally, uniting the planet is going to be difficult. Sociopaths are drawn to politics like flies to a dead carcass. This is true regardless of the country or continent. It’s just the way it works out. So I don’t see altruism winning out quite enough for planetary unity to work out. Continental, perhaps, because there is reason for that as oil declines. Never forget that oil is always declining – and eventually this will be sand in the gears of any global effort at unity, or much else global.

    In the event of massive “power down” scenario, global comms and shipping and travel are kaput. People must focus local to survive this, and worrying about another country 2500 miles away is off the menu. Finding food and fuel and clean water are paramount – so thinking of that as a driver for unification is fraught with non-critical thinking.

    Those are my thoughts, much as I wish things could be otherwise. We are not even cognizant of what we do to the planet yet, so I don’t see this happening unless it is a global religious movement, a giant shift in consciousness. And that would take something unheard of in history.

    @ Chris Fernglade…

    That bloke was wise! Living that way pays dividends that one cannot put into a coin purse or bank account.

    I think there is just too much division among generations these days – we are all striving after similar things, just at different places in our timelines. Part of this is that generations in the west no longer cohabit. It hurts youth having no elders and it hurts elder having no youth to help them and hear their experiences. Makes youth repeat mistakes hard learned by the forerunners.

    Things like Strauss&Howe serve to divide us and I see generations trying to ascribe blame all the time. We are all in this together, and blame fixes NOTHING. What we ought to be doing is fixing the issues together in ways that make sense for the next generations, not ours. Politicians always fix things in ways that benefit themselves – due to their tendency towards sociopathy – and everyone else foots the bill regardless of generation.

    Having 3 generations under one roof is long gone, but it will make a comeback – because it makes more survival sense than what we do today.

  147. I was wondering: Trump’s tariffs popping the fragile official bubble economy, causing mayhem there, yet helping the real, goods and services economy, meanwhile, Trump pulling an FDR and seizing the chaotic, imploding bubble economy and making sure that the markets still function, all the while getting as much grief, if not more, than FDR, for his “illegal” (albeit temporary) seizures. Would that be something this and the Cancer ingress predict?

  148. All–

    Very late in the comment cycle here and perhaps somewhat OT, but I’ve witnessed and/or engaged in a couple of conversations that seem to shed some light on how the Democrats might be shifting their arguments in response to the times.

    Re war, Trump potentially leaving Syria, and the like:

    The discussion was all about Al Aqaeda, “defending America,” preventing another 9/11, rooting out global terrorism, etc, etc. The Democrats becoming the war party. How predictable.

    A second conversation, apropos of nothing in particular, but still catching my eye, re “gay Republicans”:

    Anyone who is gay and still a Republican is wealthy and/or an unmitigated racist. Probably both. [And I’m thinking to myself, “I know a few people who’d rather take exception to this…”]

    Admittedly, these snap-shots are not a broad sample of the state of the party necessarily, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they were representative. I am not at all encouraged at the prospect of the Democrats making the much-needed reforms come 2020. Rather, they very much appear to be doubling-down on the mistakes that have brought them to this point.

    The whole thing is quite sad.

  149. A late comment about weather patterns. I’ve lived about equal portions of my 50+ years in southeastern PA (reasonably close to Cumberland) and in eastern and southeastern MA (reasonably close to Providence), so I can tell you what to expect. (Of course, I can’t tell you what will actually happen.) The main difference is that in New England the period of weather generally regarded as spring-like is delayed and abbreviated, sometimes not arriving until mid May or so (though late April is more usual), and transitions rapidly to summer-like conditions sometime between late June and mid July.

    The old saw about “If you don’t like the weather in [place], wait ten minutes [or some other short period of time],” does apply in New England. However, based on personal experience I usually append, “…unless you don’t like it because it’s overcast, chilly, windy, and drizzling, in which case you’d better wait three days.”

  150. Shane, I’m far from sure Trump and his followers see the broader context of what they’re doing, but yes, that’s the way it’s working out.

    L, retrograde planets in a natal chart show that what the planet indicates will be internal to you, rather than a matter of external circumstances; your difficulties in third house matters will be a matter of your own shyness and reticence, not of the behavior of others. (Though I doubt you got along well with older siblings, if you had any.) If the planet in question turned around and went direct within a few months of your birth, then that represents a challenge that you end up successfully overcoming, and there are standard methods (progression and solar arc direction) by which an astrologer can determine roughly when that’ll happen.

    Oilman2, it’s possible that one of the two parties will collapse; it’s equally possible, though, that one of the two parties will be seized by the insurgent generation, and the other party will by default become the gathering place for defenders of the old order. The Democratic Party was pretty moribund after 1920, which is why FDR was able to seize it and remake it in his own image from 1932 on; the same thing could happen again. (My guess, though, is that this time the Republican party will be taken over by Trumpistas, and the Democrats become the reactionary party that tries to govern as though it’s still 1980.

    Twin Ruler, normally I don’t put through off topic comments like this, but I’m going to make an exception here, because you’ve done such a good job of doing the things I talked about in last week’s post, when I mentioned the ways that people who have opinions unacceptable to the mainstream present them in ways that make sure nobody will take them seriously. Starting off a discussion with “I know you’ll laugh at me” or something like that is a really good example of this. (I’d encourage my other readers to go through Twin Ruler’s comment here and note all the other places he does the same kind of thing. It’ll be valuable preparation for future posts here.)

    As it happens — and you’ve been reading this blog long enough that you should know this — I consider it very likely that there were relatively advanced human civilizations during the ice ages, and the myth of Atlantis represents a dim cultural memory of the end of the last such civilization in the massive postglacial floods that followed the end of the Younger Dryas cold period around 9600 BC. For heaven’s sake, I’ve written a book about the subject! So you didn’t need to go through all the standard “I know you’ll laugh at me” motions in the first place.

    My question to you, though, is this. You’ve posted three comments in response to this post, two of which got put through. All three of them were attempts to change the subject and talk about something unrelated to the theme of this week’s post. Why did you do that, when you know I ask commenters to stay on topic? Does something in the post make you that uncomfortable?

    Varun, gotcha. One of the drawbacks to Aspergers syndrome is that I very often miss the social signals that tell everyone else a joke is on the way…

    Patricia, thanks for the correction! Less Uranus, even more Saturn — duly noted. 🙂 As for consistency, Eostre was a Pagan goddess, and if you can tell me where the famous springtime rabbit fits into Christian mythology, I’ll be very impressed.

    Mike, of course. Sometimes it’s intuition, and sometimes it’s simply a matter of noticing that the currently accepted paradigm doesn’t explain the facts on the ground that well.

    Chris, I also found Catton’s book far more moving. His background was in sociology, so unlike Meadows et al., he recognized the tremendous social and psychological obstacles to the necessary changes, and thus was able to recognize the tremendous tragedy of the industrial age — the hard fact that a civilization that prided itself on its problem-solving capacity was able to solve all problems except the ones it created for itself.

    Username, fair enough, and thanks for the clarification. I don’t use inauguration charts in mundane astrology, as I haven’t found that they lead to accurate political predictions. Of course your mileage may vary!

    Eric, my tentative take is that what’s happening is a reversal of the basic economic dynamic that’s been in play in the US since 1980: the transfer of wealth from the hinterlands to coastal urban enclaves. The hinterlands are no longer being stripmined for wealth quite so assiduously, so such subsidy dumpsters as the tech industry are getting smacked to the pavement. As trade barriers cut in and the flow of wealth begins to reverse, economic sectors that have been riding high on the hog for the last three decades are going to be left on their rumps in the dust as the hog wiggles out from under them, while other sectors — which employ a much larger share of the work force — will begin to recover. As for the Neptune placement, I think that’s more likely to refer to the delusional reality shaping the upper end of the political establishment just now, but we’ll see.

    Username, fair enough! I’ll be offering my predictions on the basis of the ingress come June.

    Shane, no doubt, but unless the average day starts sprouting more than 24 hours, the antics of Hollywood are way down on my get-to list. Besides, you’ve just given me a nice crisp rundown of the points of interest, for which thank you. 😉

    Ray, yep — you’ve definitely scored a hit. As for the way so much of the left seems to be committed to the strategy of alienating as many potential supporters as possible, so as to lose gloriously (in their own imaginations, at least) — why, yes, exactly. We’ll be talking about that at greater length in upcoming posts.

    Shane, we’ll discuss that in June. 😉

    David, it’s not surprising at all that the Democrats are talking like Republicans now. Clinton and Obama both copied the the policies of the last successful Republican administration right down to the details — Clinton channeled Reagan, Obama channeled Dubya — and their followers, including those who spent eight straight years shrieking hatred at Reagan and Dubya, cheered them on. What has the Dems freaking out now is that Trump is actually pursuing his own policies, in place of the ones they surreptitiously borrowed from the GOP. In place of the Reagan-Thatcher lie TINA — “there is no alternative” — we’ve got TIARA — “there is a real alternative” — and the well-to-do leftists who profited mightily from the Reagan-Thatcher counterrevolution while claiming to denounce it are facing the end of the gravy train that’s kept them so comfortable for so long. No wonder they’re losing their cool!

    Walt, that should be fine, then. Overcast, chilly, windy, and drizzling — why, that sounds just like summer weather in Seattle during my insufficiently misspent boyhood. No wonder I’m finding Rhode Island so pleasant… 😉

  152. Hello,

    I have seen this article on Reuters
    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-cyber-atlanta/with-paper-and-phones-atlanta-struggles-to-recover-from-cyber-attack-idUSKBN1H70R0

    It is interesting that the solution being considered is, of course, to reinforce cyber security measures. It makes sense because right now there seem to be easy gains available in that area, as apparently the systems being used by the city are not aligned with each other in terms of software age and security policies.

    I have often wondered what would happen to IT specialists when all the software in the world would just become one, flawless and totally connected without failure in its operation.
    However the question bears reversing: what happens when it becomes too expensive to keep following the bandwagon? The notion of price inflation is never discussed at all in IT. It’s like a taboo, probably because IT is one of the superstitions of our age, along with robots, AI, virtual reality and space travel.

    Does astrology has anything more informative to say about the near future of information technology, other than the obvious trends everyone can see but won’t really question openly ?

  153. To clarify : in the future the gains in cyber security won’t be so easy to grab for a city like Atlanta since the complexity of information technology subjects it to the law of diminishing returns, and the theory of asymmetric warfare pretty much guarantees that its complexity will have to keep on increasing.
    So a cyber security overhaul 10 years from now’s current effort will be, say, twice as expensive while leaving them still as exposed as they would be after now’s efforts have paid off.

  154. A small thanks to Twin Ruler– I was looking for a book to read on trip I really don’t want to make and remembered JMG’s ‘Atlantis’. Might take ‘World Full of Gods’ also.

  155. JMG,
    fair enough, but when pop culture starts to channel JMG, it’s time to sit up and take notice! Remember when you got a shout out from Glenn Beck?
    As far as Trump demonizing California, most of you all aren’t on his email list. God knows how many emails I get along the lines of “those evilly evil Californians who don’t support our values are blah, blah, blah.” I’ve never seen a president so eager to widen the divide and split the country up.

  156. John and anyone else,

    I had originally wanted to put this in the normally scheduled ask me anything post, but since the comments are kind of moving toward this direction, here goes:

    In the last month freight rates (bulk shipping) have skyrocketed. First heard it from the owner of a local garden center, but Wolf Richter confirmed it in a post on his site. Anyone have any clue why? Are we starting to see an actual recovery of the Main Street economy? Or something else, probably temporary?

    I have found this extremely puzzling, since up to now every other valid economic indicator I’ve seen indicated the real economy was still crashing.

  157. I’ve been wondering about the whole “what would astrology be on other planets” thing ever since I started watching The Expanse (a show where humanity has colonized Mars and the asteroid belt). I don’t know any astrologers to ask though. I think it would be a fun discussion though.

  158. @John – oh, no, the bunny is decidedly Germanic/Norse. Two tiny bunny figurines that are NOT cutesy-poo, one of which, in fact,more clearly a March Hare (called a jackrabbit in these parts) are decorating my Ostara altar this season. Lined up as if visiting Mam Gaia.

  160. Thank you for this interesting post about Astrology. All I know about it is that I am a Leo and think I should be a Cancer as I don’t fit Leo at all and was born two weeks late. I have been rather a nay-sayer about the subject but will certainly start to look at it differently, not the newspaper columns though, at least not yet.

  161. Hi John B,

    One of the largest costs in freight is that of the fuel. You may be seeing an expression of the increase in the price of diesel? Certainly all that output from fracking does not produce diesel or jet fuel.

    As an interesting side story, I’ve also noticed that the cost of plane travel down under has risen to levels not seen for ten or twenty years. As a disclaimer, I don’t travel by aircraft anywhere, any more, although I have done so in the past. This policy of mine has social consequences unfortunately…

    Chris

  163. Jean, er, if you can show me any technology anywhere, ever, that has ever been “one, flawless and totally connected without failure in its operation,” I’ll take that claim seriously. Au contraire, if the tech geeks of the world ever succeed in getting all the world’s computers networked together, the most likely outcome would be a global Blue Screen of Death. IT specialists will remain employed as long as there are computers, because neither humans nor their technologies are capable of perfection.

    As for Atlanta’s best response, why,. the CIA figured that out a while ago. They’ve discovered that the only way to keep foreign agents from hacking their communications is to go back to manual typewriters, paper documents, and locked filing cabinets. As ransomware attacks and similar problems become more and more common, I expect to see more people making that same choice.

    Janitor, thank you. Enjoy!

    Shane, sure, but I didn’t start watching (or reading) Beck in response… 😉

    John, fascinating. That bears close watching.

    Audrey, it’s fairly simple in theory, though the programming would be a bear — you’d have to come up with the necessary algorithms to locate the planets relative to the position of Mars, and go from there. Oh, and Mars has two moons of its own, of course, and their position would matter! It’s fascinating to think about, though there are good reasons to think that we’ll never actually settle any planet other than this one.

    Patricia, why, then your Eostre celebration is perfectly consistent with your faith!

    Jill, when people say “you’re a Leo,” all that means is that the Sun was in Leo when you were born. The positions of the Moon and the planets also matter, and so does your rising sign — the sign of the zodiac that was on the eastern horizon the moment you were born. You may have a bunch of planets in Cancer, or Cancer rising, or any of a number of other things — and a lot of the canned notions of “this is what Leos are like” are pretty inaccurate, for that matter.

    If you happen to know the time as well as the date and place of your birth, you can go to a free astrology website such as http://www.astro.com, go to the free horoscope page, enter that information, and get an actual horoscope — this will give you a much better idea of how astrology works.

  164. When Matt Savinar, the peak oil author and blogger left to become a full time astrologer, many people called him a nutcase and wrote him off. To me it was a strangely strong reaction. What do you think of that?

  165. Chris,
    My understanding was that truck drivers have been raising their rates. What people forget though is that a lot of independent drivers left the business as they got nickel and dimed to death during the great recession. So, like schoolteachers, they want more money and are apparently in a position to get it…The increased cost of shipping is being passed on, but companies may have difficulty passing the increase all the way to the consumer.
    JMG,
    My take on the Easter Bunny (St. Bede really doesn’t give us much to go on) is that he is very much like Punxatawny Phil, when viewed from a Frazerian perspective. In other words, the emerging ground critter is a harbinger of the return of the vegetation deity, whether Persephone or a more obviously solar vegetation God…
    Berserker

  166. Pingback: An Astrological Interlude: Cancer Ingress 2018 - Ecosophia

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