Sign-By-Sign for AUGUST 1998
ARIES
TAURUS GEMINI CANCER
LEO VIRGO
LIBRA SCORPIO SAGITARIUS
CAPRICORN AQUARIUS
PISCES
One day next summer, August 11,
1999, at 11:08 am GMT, to be exact, the Sun will appear to dim out, blocked
by the solid, lifeless mass of the Moon. At this moment, our little world
will be centered at the cross-hairs of several planets closely aligned
at 90 degrees in a big known, curiously enough, as a "grand"
cross.For my good friends Joe Blow and Jane Doe in the reading audience,
who don't normally stroll around at lunch hour pondering planetary alignments
or The Millennium, I can offer only this definitive interpretation: It
won't be your average Wednesday.I know, it's a stretch. Clearly, we're
more intellectually advanced than the natives Magellan tricked into believing
he could make the Sun go out because he had predicted an eclipse, which
gave him a lot of clout in their eyes. For the illuminated, educated mind
of a modern Westerner, omens from the invisible world went out with the
1692 witchcraft trials in Salem. Right?But then there are the pesky facts.
Eclipses, whether we understand them or not, mark intense transition points.
The Persian Gulf War and the death of Diana, Princess of Wales are among
them, plus a peculiar weekend several years ago when an electrical malfunction
caused a rare chain-reaction of PCB and dioxin explosions that tainted
buildings at SUNY-New Paltz so badly that the clean-up bill exceeded $50
million, and one building could not be re-entered by students for six
years. That same weekend, eight students were crushed to death in a bizarre
incident in the City College of New York gymnasium. Both the SUNY and
CCNY disasters were traced to negligence by public officials; the Gulf
Oil War was murder; Diana's driver was drunk; but they all happened.Eclipses,
which often feel on a personal level like sudden, inevitable shifts in
our lives, are not noted in most peoples' date books, and we're trained
to ignore the connections rather than see them. The only place society
consistently acknowledges astrology, the second oldest profession, is
in a little mystical ghetto known as the horoscope column, though eclipses
are often considered too esoteric to get mentioned.
Besides eclipses, grand crosses are about the only other events that entice
astrologers to drop their charts, get on their knees and press their heads
to Mother Earth. They happen every now and again (August 1996 comes to
mind), but not like this one, which involves the Sun and Moon, Mars, Saturn
and Uranus, precisely aligned across the powerful "fixed cross"
of the zodiacTaurus, Leo, Scorpio and Aquariuswith the Earth dangling
in the middle of it all like a pea, and a total solar eclipse thrown in
for good measure. Frankly, it's ominous.
When I started to get a sense of the whole business, my instinct was to
print greeting cards, beautiful plastic-coated things with Jesus in a
white raiment descending from the illuminated orange clouds of heaven,
bearing the message, "Good Luck on Judgment Day."
After all, the calf, lion, eagle and man, the symbols of the four fixed
signs, re-appear as what some people call "the four beasts of the
apocalypse" in the so-called Book of Revelation, that 1st century
masterpiece of political propaganda and occult symbolism that got stuck
onto the end of the Christian Bible. Its spectacular visions of flaming
trees, oceans of blood and swarms of locusts that sting like scorpions
(inflicted upon us by a loving God, incidentally, mostly for the ever-popular
crime of fucking) have been used to torment humanity (and entertain assorted
poets, artists and tripping college students) since around the day it
was written. The journalist Hunter S. Thompson says it's what he reads
when he's bored at 4 a.m. in a hotel someplace like Nashville. The front
desk, which doesn't usually stock Chaucer and Blake, always has one laying
around.
Still, the Book of Revelation maintains those few persistent shreds of
credibilitythe poisonous ones I keep finding in my food and water, with
fancy names like 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-para-dioxin. Revelation's
images of "sorceries" and "vials of wrath" remind
me a tad too much of my collection of Monsanto Chemical Co. documents
for comfort, the evidence-tagged ones featuring sorcerers in lab coats
cooking up their Pyrex jars of toxic rage.Much as I'd love to dismiss
the eclipse and the notion of an "apocalypse" as bullshit, the
end of the world thing raises some valid questions now, and just in time.
Of course "the world" isn't ending any time soon, but we're
a different story. The poison is indeed spreading, households are in turmoil,
and fear is rising. It's astonishing to me, ominous in fact, how many
people smoke cigarettes no matter how much they know about how many poisons
they contain, as if, why worry? As noted by German philosopher Dieter
Duhm in his Political Theory for a Nonviolent Earth, there are many people
already living in apocalyptic times. They range from the U'wa people of
Colombia, who have threatened to commit mass suicide to protest destruction
of the environment by oil exploration and drilling in their ancestral
homelands, to many Christian and survivalist sects currently preparing
for "The End" as a matter of what they feel is common sense.
We look at them askance, with a kind of sideways leer, and yet sometimes
with a little envy, not so arrogant as to think they're totally nuts.
I mean, who knows, right? When you stop and think about life for one second,
your brain flashes: This Is Weird. And there's a little dioxin and PCBs
in everything we eat and drink, right? And sperm counts in men today are
half of our grandfathers', right? At that rate, how long before we're
all sterile? And what about cancer rates hovering at around 50%?Deep in
the backs of our minds, way down in the dim crevices of the brainstem,
near the data we use to fart, lurks the question of whether there's going
to be some big cataclysm to mark the end of the
millennium. Something like a financial market disaster or a chunk of California
falling off the map, or a little
atomic skirmish in midtown Manhattan, just to let us know we got it over
with. After all these aeons, we
finally have the ability to nuke ourselves, and good. And I mean, wouldn't
it come as a great relief, after all
the suspense? The question I hear asked most often seems to be when, not
what. People in my
community in New York seriously talk about Mohonk Mountain House becoming
a kind of seaside resort.
Then there are those highly spiritual and politically conscious individuals
secretly wishing "It" will happen,
just to screw the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers and the banks. Anything
for a little revenge.
And then, finally, are the sensible folk, the cool, rational beings who
are certain things out there will be
fine, but get the pressure from in there. It penetrates the air conditioning,
the carpets and the surround-
sound Vivaldi, mindless of the unplugged phones, creeping clear through
the lies they told just to get a
little peace and quiet. Lurking quietly in the corner.
Waiting.Little glimpses of how reality has become disconnected from what
some people call "spirit" or "the
source" and what other people call "the planet" are everywhere.
There is an inner world wanting to burst
out, and an outer world constantly bursting in, demanding to know: How
long are we going to keep doing
nothing about the devastation of the rain forests for the sake of Big
Macs? What about that nuclear
dumping in the oceans you read about yesterday? And why are you pretending
the slow, steady heating of
the atmosphere is meaningless? Don't the questions themselves drive us
so mad that denial is an essential
part of getting through the day? Don't they scream, "You are powerless!"
I would call this a first-class
spiritual crisis. Nothing Bill Clinton signs or that the UN adopts can
stop it. No well-documented facts we
read in the newspaper, like the ones about the tobacco scandals, can make
us change our lives.
Then there's the eclipse, which blazes out like a huge yellow sign on
the slick highway blinking C - A - U - T - I - O - N. Eclipses release
pressure, which can be messy, and we are under pressure. However, I
am one of those good news astrologers. Massive eclipses? Flaming trees?
No problem. Grand crosses?
Oceans of blood? All in a day's work. Locusts that sting like scorpions?
I have a recipe for them. My job is
to miraculously turn anything and everything I see in the sky into some
kind of uplifting message from
which, at the very least, no matter how dismal, pathetic and hopeless
things look, you can gain fresh
perspective and take action rather than merely freak.
This is one reason why I'm writing about this long before the New York
Post and the Weekly World News
and The Jesus Channel grab hold of it. I expect that my esteemed colleagues
at these reputable media, and
lots of others, will have a feeding-frenzy withor under the crazed influence
ofthis eclipse the like of
which we haven't seen in a while. Here's why.
Within days of the event, the Earth will be visited, hopefully briefly,
by a gadget called the Cassini Space
Probe. Remember that name, if you don't already. This device was sent
out by space aliensnamely the
US government's cosmocrats at NASA, who last October launched Cassini
amid great but not-great-
enough controversy. Cassini's flight path is currently taking it to Venus,
after which it will fly back past the
Earth next summer, timed impeccably with the eclipse. This "fly-by"
will hopefully "slingshot" the probe
further out into space, past Jupiter, to photograph our old friend Saturn.
Astrologically, Saturn represents
the edge, and we are surely headed there.
The problem is this: Cassini contains 72 pounds of high-grade plutonium,
used in the electrical batteries
that run its digital brain, radios and cameras. This sexy (and expensive)
hunk of radioactivity will skim past
the Earth's atmosphere moving very, very fastat about 42,300 miles per
hour. If the slide-rule dudes at
NASA screwed the pooch on their calculations, or if something mechanical
or technical goes wrong that
day, then Cassini, which has no heat shields, can re-enter the atmosphere,
where it would incinerate like a
meteor, spewing its nuclear stash all over the biosphere. This would be
bad.
Seventy-two pounds is mucho plutonium. Far less can make a modest atomic
bomb, say, something on
the scale of Hiroshima. But this is an atomic battery, not a bomb, and
the potential danger is the release
of the plutonium rather than an explosion. In one prior space accident,
just two pounds of plutonium
burned up on re-entry of a satellite, and traces of that specific satellite's
fuel, which were marked
("radioactively tagged"), were found in every corner of the
globe. According to Dr. Helen Caldicott of
Physicians for Social Responsibility, and other scientists, exposure to
only one-millionth of a gram of the
stuff can cause lung cancer, which means many other illnesses too. Thus,
Cassini packs enough plutonium
to give more than 32 billion people lung cancer. The planet Pluto represents
mass-consciousness. Now I
see why.
NASA documents talk about the need to "demolish some or all structures"
in the event of Cassini
falling from space and hitting a city, and to "relocate the affected
population permanently." They've even
budgeted for it.
In addition to Cassini being a very stupid idea, could it be the "terror
from the sky" that Nostradamus
predicted hundreds of years ago for July and August 1999?
According to Dr. Karl Grossman, the investigative reporter and journalism
professor at SUNY-
Westbury who's digging out all the facts on this issue, NASA keeps raising
its estimates of how many
thousands of people would be killed by "accidental" re-entry
of Cassini. Yet while scientists, astrologers
and Revelation-toting Christians generally consider one another heretics,
it all does kinda point to the
same thing.
As for old Nostradamus, he's right. There will indeed be "terror
from the sky" next summer if the
media grab the Cassini story and run with it, terrifying everyone, perhaps
legitimately, yet pretending they
had no clue about the danger of the plutonium release last October when
Cassini was launched. And if
they don'tman, then I'll be even more shocked. It would sell a lot of
newspapers, and besides which, we
have a right to know.
So the grand cross/total solar eclipse of August 1999 turns out to be
a kind of final exam for the
second millennium, with many questions. We are, in my reading, facing
a global initiation. The Earth itself
takes center stage (at the center of the cross, and in the flight path
of Cassini). An aspect of this initiation
is that we get to respond to an environmental threat together. What will
it be? Terror? Repentance?
Rage? Will we pack into the discos, like in Tel Aviv the night Saddam
Hussein was shooting off Scud
missiles? Will we stay calm and let Cassini whir right by, refusing to
suck it in with our fear?
Will we take the perfectly platinum opportunity to demand that the other
dozen or so scheduled
nuclear-powered NASA missions be scrubbed because the risk is just too
ridiculous? Will we demand an
end to the new, improved plan for the nuclear arming of space that the
US government is currently
executing? Will we look at some other very important environmental issues
ourselves, rather than
expecting expert commissions to handle them for us?
People love disasters. Disasters bring out the best in us. I've covered
my share of midnight fires and
ecological catastrophes, and it's very exciting. Things like blackouts,
floods, earthquakes, subway strikes
and wars pull the community together and make us all heroes. Sure, a few
of us die, but it's worth it,
right? One splendid week of the whole planet facing a massive threat to
its existence"terror from the
sky"would just perk us all right up like laughing daisies, and make
the global village a real experience,
not just a modem. And what a great movie concept!
In this light, the biggest question Cassini raises is about the outer
life versus the inner life: what you
might call the galactic versus the genetic. Do you have to be forced by
allegedly outer circumstances to
look at your existence, or do you look because it's time? Here's the one
huge place where I lack my faith
in the human race. Space Alien lottery tickets are very popular. Too many
people, for my comfort, need
UFOs landing in their back yards to believe that "we are not alone."
Too few people can just pet a dog.
We know from countless movies that the threat is always from "out
there." We like it that way. Yet is
it clear this time that human beings have personally turned this weapon
on the Earth?
Surely, a whole bunch of fear zapped from you, through you and into you
all at once in
a kind of high-tech cosmic horror-show, reported live on CNNcomplete with
prophesies and astrology charts to back it upcan wake you up and finally
get you feeling
alive and thinking seriously about your life choices and what it means
to be here with the
rest of us on our little blue world in space. There's a better way. But
heygood luck on
judgment day.
SIGN-BY-SIGN FOR AUGUST 1998
ARIES
BACK TO TOP
(March 21-April 19) When last we met, yours was a whole different life.
I can see here in my
crystal screen that the forces of change are working their ways upon your
reality, some of the pressure
has come off, and that you may be entertaining taking what you feel are
some odd risks. All I can say is
this. The only real risk is a creative risk. We gamble nothing in either
security or destruction, because of
these things the end is certain. Art, original ideas, putting forth your
thoughts in the moment they arise,
expressing your passion, and keeping your promise to always go your own
way: these are dangerous, and
are among the few things even worth doing.
TAURUS
BACK TO TOP(April
20-May 20) Of the emotions it's most absurd to repress, anger must top
the list.
We don't do this naturally, we do it because people who feel guilty for
how they're treating usalcoholic
parents and mean teachers, for example, not to mention assorted religious
leadersfind it easier to crush
us than to deal with their diseased ways. There's a poem by Marge Piercy
that I like to recite at the end of
environmental demonstrations, where the good, the angry and often helpless
people of the world unite.
She says, "Goodness is not dangerous enough. I want goodness like
Nike [the Greek goddess of victory]
armed with the warhead of rightful anger. Goodness that can live on sand
and stones and wring wine from
burrs. Goodness that can put forth fruit, manured on the sewage of hatred.
The good must cultivate their
anger like fields of wheat that must feed them, if they are ever to win."
GEMINI
BACK TO TOP
(May 21-June 20) At the Science and Technology Museum in Munich, there's
a golden
statue of the Sun in the center court yard. Fairly close by is a sign
that says "Mercury" and then perhaps a
hundred paces away is one for "Venus," and so on, until you've
walked about a mile and finally come to a
sign for Saturn, which is one of the closer planets to us. Keep walking,
for several miles, and you'll
eventually arrive at the sign for Pluto, a planet from which the actual
Sun looks like a tiny little star. Is it
true this is how far away you feel from some of the most important people
in your life? And isn't it also
true that you need to walk for perhaps half an hour at most, or drive
ten minutes, to get back to the
center of your life? That is to say, you're not on Pluto, it just feels
that way.
CANCER
BACK TO TOP
(June 21-July 22) Navigational Advisory: Expect some wild financial fluctuations
in the
coming month, with gale-force economic winds blowing three directions
at once, mysterious undersea
currents that drag you to places for which you have no maps and don't
speak the language, messages
arriving by bottle and carrier pigeon, and experiences that will test
the limits of both your sailing skills and
your faith in yourself. When this all ends, I trust you'll find yourself
safe and secure in a new, strange land
where the natives offer you peculiar and delicious fruits, having learned
something crucial about that odd
green species known as money, and incidentally, having acquired more than
a few things that money only
wishes it could buy.
LEO
BACK TO TOP(July
23-Aug. 22) Some how, some way, an opportunity you either missed or dodged
10 years
ago is now about to present itself to you again. Perhaps you were too
young. Perhaps you were too
scared, or maybe, long, long ago, you fell for someone's pronouncement
of your genuine ideals as anti-
social nonsense. And so for years, your dream has lurked beneath the surface
of human life, wishing it
could emerge, seeing expression in other people, but never quite making
it into the waking world. You
won't fall for it again, dear. Astrologically, this is a very strange
thing, and it has arrived with one of those
twilight-zone moments in which I check the charts and tables four times,
then upside down while dancing
the bugaloo, just to make sure I'm seeing straight. This is merely enhancing
my sense of how important
your opportunity is, and what an explosion of magnificent, chaotic and
incomprehensible life-force energy
may attend its arrival in the coming weeks.
VIRGO
BACK TO TOP(Aug.
23-Sept. 21) My aunt, a Pisces by the way, just published a book on dreams,
but for
some reason she has a hard time believing that the dream dimension is
a real place. It seems unlikely to
her, and not sufficiently "proven," that we can meet there and
return with shared experiences, have
actual visits with long-gone relatives, or experience aspects of the future.
Proof or no proof, I would
estimate that at least half the population has consciously had one or
more of these experiences, and by
the way, far more curious things are documented in a book called The Holographic
Universe by Michael
Talbot. August would be a great month for you to read that book, and to
experiment with a dream
journal into which you enter all other-world, outer-world or underworld
experiences, those of the day
and of the night. In these regions, you will discover the best clues about
how to create the richest life
possible in the most curious year ahead.
LIBRA
BACK TO TOP
(Sep. 22-Oct. 22) When the mythological centaur Pholus opened the jar
of sacred wine he'd
been guarding for four generations, he had no clue what havoc his small
decision would set loose on the
world around himan event sometimes known as "The War of the Centaurs."
Every action has its
consequences, and in your life right now they're particularly unpredictable.
Like Pholus's wine, they often
have roots in the deep past, which accounts for their unusual force. Over
the next few weeks, friends
may seem to lure you into things that violate your instinctsand yet you
may decide to go along anyway.
It's also obvious that you have many other stunning opportunities that
don't involve anyone you currently
know, especially people you may later decide were not your friends. I
can offer only two points of advice.
One is, when in doubt, kick everyone out and make your decisions alone.
Second, if you happen to
encounter real danger, all you have to do is walk, not run, just casually
saunter away.
SCORPIO
BACK TO TOP
(Oct. 23-Nov. 22) For the next 33 days, the cosmic forces are offering
all Scorpios a
special deal: you can cash in every unit of faith for five units of power.
In recent weeks you've experienced
a new surge of emotional gumption, a kind of super-epoxy-moxy, with a
spiritual charge like what Thomas
Jefferson must have felt when he brought in the Bill of Rights from the
place where Justice is real. Stay
with that feeling. To succeed, whether in battle with evil or in the development
of your soul, requires
awakening the aspect of yourself that already knows, without any doubt,
that who and what you are is
exactly correct. I speak of faith, not in any particular outcome, not
in tomorrow, but in this very moment
of your being. Five to one, cultivate this and watch it blossom as a sense
of strength that's yours to
experience, and woe be to anyone who inflicts you harm.
SAGITARIUS
BACK TO TOP
(Nov. 23-Dec 21) Would you feel better if I said that all the perpetual
bullshit
you've been going through is designed to save you a decade of work on
yourself? That the trials, clearings-
out and internal rearrangements originally planned for completion in 2010
will be finished by around the
end of next year? Didn't think so. Perhaps this will help. August presents
you with most unusual
opportunities to aggressively seize new ground in your life. Over the
course of about four weeks, worlds
will reverse their orbits, vast holes in the Universe will pop open through
which you may leap, and the
pathetic people hassling you will go on vacation. That's when to pounce.
If you get the feeling this little
campaign of conquering is too egotistical for your tastes, don't worry,
that's just your ego talking. This
month in particular, it's obvious that your higher self is the one in
command.
CAPRICORN
BACK TO TOP(Dec.
22-Jan. 19) I was on the phone with your guardian angel yesterday, and
she
said you needed a Tarot reading. So here goes: I see you in a beautiful
garden, but with some kind of black
cloud over your head. Looking at that cloud, I see that written on it
is someone else's old idea of what's
right for you. He or she is probably wrong, yet there's an important opportunity
contained within their
opinion. Look for the hidden message, and if feels right, take it as your
own. Looking ahead: what's really
stuffing you into a bottle is the notion that you must somehow sacrifice
yourself in order to attain what
you want. It's true there will be some significant life change on the
way there, but in that process you
won't be forced to give up anything you truly need. Prepare to let everything
else go, and remember that
you'll need to use your full power and act very swiftly when the time
arrives.
AQUARIUS
BACK TO TOP
(Jan. 19-Feb. 18) A myth perpetuated by certain alleged scientists holds
that the
human organism lives on food, water and air. I have substantial evidence
that, in fact, we live on vision. My
grandfather, who was a draftsman, pointed out that every manifested object
we see at first exists
somewhere else in the form of a drawing, which is, in its turn, a picture
of an idea someone had. Many
painters even do their work from sketches, or what are called "studies,"
and they are fascinating to look at. I
mention this now because between August and November, you are an especially
luminous mindframe to create your own "Notebook of the Future"a
set of writings and drawings of what your life can become, inspired by
anything and everything you see, hear, think and feel. There's just one
small catch: during this time, you are the keeper of your own visions.
No one else can possibly do it for you.
PISCES
BACK TO TOP(Feb.
19-Mar. 20) Reading from a book written by one of the century's most brilliant
occultists the other day, she embarked upon a friendly tirade addressed
to mystics and other soulful-types
about how, in general, whilst well-meaning, they often work on too lofty
of a level and get nowhere. This
goes for business people and you Galactic special agents on assignment
to set the world right. Money is
not some mysterious, alchemical, occult thing that we conjure, it's a
purely Capricorn thing. You make the
stuff by combining a need that exists in this world with something you
have that fills that need. So, to all of
my friends who are aspiring musicians, painters, writers, photographers,
progressive business
entrepreneurs, comedians, crystal healers, dancers and all other professional
surfers: This means you.
You've got something special and most eminently practical. Engage in a
conspiracy of success.
Eric Francis is an astrologer and investigative journalist traveling in
Europe. ethos@Star-Navigator.com
or http://www.Star-Navigator.com.
Visit his web site at http://www.Star-Navigator.com. You can e-mail him
at CentaurEF@aol.com
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