Last weeks repeal of the military’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy is a great example of the current collective Jupiter-Uranus conjunction (currently a very tight conjunction within 4 degrees of exact) coming through. The Jupiter-Uranus cycle regularly corresponds to celebrated breakthroughs in many different areas of human experience (politics, science, the arts, sports, etc.). Richard Tarnas has thoroughly documented the Jupiter-Uranus cycle in his book Cosmos and Psyche, and last week’s breakthrough is consistent with the evidence he presents there.
Woman Bites off Husband’s Tongue
This is a pretty crazy story. This woman went into a manic state and bit off her husband’s tongue when he tried to kiss her. I don’t know the personal birth charts for the people involved with this story, but the collective chart for the time of the event is really striking.
The Lovely Bones
I spent the last couple of days reading Alice Sebold’s wonderful novel, “The Lovely Bones.” In looking at Sebold’s chart (birth time is not known, source of birth date/place: Wikipedia) there are many wonderful astrological correlations. The Lovely Bones is the story of 14-year-old Susie Salmon who we find out in the first chapter was raped and murdered and is now narrating the novel from her place in heaven. It is a very sad and poignant story of a family torn apart by their loss, and also the story of a teenager (Susie) who has had her life cut short and is forced to watch her loved ones, and the life she was not able to live, from the remote distance of the afterlife. The tone of the novel is elegiac and melancholic, but there is also redemption and a lot of heart.

Another clear motif of the Saturn-Neptune complex is the quality of mourning, melancholy, and grief that pervades the whole novel. Saturn-Neptune is the archetype that most relates to the grieving process, and you very often see it (in natal charts or transits) when this is a dominant theme. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross is born with Saturn square Neptune, and she is of course famous for writing about the stages of the grieving process. And Sebold's novel is a vivid embodiment of these stages of grief. People born with Saturn-Neptune hard aspects are more likely to reflect on the meaning of death. The imagination (Neptune) is more likely to flow towards Death (Saturn), and there may be more desire to explore the possibility of life after death. We see this in Ken Ring (born in 1935 with Saturn opposite Neptune) who has written about the compelling research into the Near Death Experiences (NDE's) where individuals at the moment of death (before being brought back to life) famously report being pulled towards a tunnel of spiritual light.
The other major alignment in Sebold's chart that is clearly coming through in her novel is her Sun-Venus-Pluto-Uranus quadruple conjunction. The emphasis on Pluto has the negative potential for major encounters with the underworld, the shadow, and the monstrous. There are of course many positive potentials for these Pluto alignments, but in her novel they largely come through in darker ways. The Sun-Pluto archetype can be the "Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde" archetype, or the "Hero struggling with the Shadow," and in the book we see it in the character of George Harvey who is responsible for Susie's murder. In this character we see someone who has totally been possessed by his shadow impulses, and who is doing enormous destructive damage to others. This is obviously an extreme form of the Sun-Pluto complex, but it is an archetype that represents the universal human struggle with the dark forces of the psyche.
Sebold's Venus-Pluto conjunction comes through in the novel as a literal playing out of the Persephone (Venus) Hades (Pluto) myth. Harvey literally takes Susie down into the earth (into a dark underworld cave that he has built) to commit his crime.
As with any powerful novel such as this, there are many more correlations to explore, but I will end this post here for today.
My First Blog Post! Bill Clinton saves “Damsels in Distress.”
I am finally venturing forth into the world of blogging! My intention in these posts is to share with you my daily practice of Archetypal Astrology. This is the practice of seeing the gods alive in the world through the lens of the astrological archetypes. There are three main forms of practice: what I call “Natal Chart Yoga,” “Transit Yoga,” and “World Transit Yoga,” which I also call “New York Times Yoga,” or “CNN Yoga.” By “yoga” I simply mean “spiritual practice,” and I am referring to the way in which the practice of astrology transforms consciousness. What before was a simple New York Times headline, through astrology, now becomes an entryway into a form of spiritual awareness.
But the immediate question I had as an astrologer when I saw the story was “What are Clinton’s transits?”I was thinking to myself that the former president must really be loving this one: getting to play the rescuing hero on the global stage. The story is so dramatic that it has the potential for bringing a kind of collective forgiveness and redemption for his past sins. Before I looked up his chart I thought that he must have some powerful transit involving his Sun, as he is shining so brightly in the story, and the archetype of the hero is coming though so strongly. Indeed, when I saw the transit, it made perfect sense, Clinton is getting the once-in-a-lifetime transit of the collective Jupiter-Neptune conjunction (the “world transit” most relevant to this happy story) directly opposite his Sun (Jupiter and Neptune are also forming a transiting grand trine pattern with Clinton’s natal Jupiter trine Uranus–another fantastic transit). In recent months both Jupiter and Neptune have been sitting within one degree of his natal Sun, and thus this whole year for Clinton has the potential to be a kind of personal spiritual redemption. Just the Jupiter-Sun transit alone (a particularly powerful one, as Jupiter stationed exactly opposite his Sun) is the alignment for the “successful hero,” but with Neptune, it becomes much more poignant and there is this deeper potential for a kind of personal healing (as in the healing hug with Al Gore).