…an astrological “perfect storm” that stretched probability...

By John Townley, August 2013

The highly unsettled astrological weather in the last couple of months makes it worth taking a look at how shifting and overlapping sets of cycles and their lengths can turn the expected semi-regularity of everyday life into a whole season of topsy-turvy, unmanaged rhythms that just won’t settle down. It’s like, when flipping a coin, just as you were getting used to roughly alternative heads and tails, suddenly you get a dozen heads in a row. And then a dozen tails. Kind of unsettling, but just according to the laws of chance, the expected odds, it’s bound to happen eventually, and there’s no way of predicting it. When throwing a pair of dice, you get similar runs, but a lot more often, as some numbers just come up more frequently by the nature of the number pairs, as any gambler knows.  Frequent sevens are to be expected, to win or crap out, but roll a lot of Boxcars or Snake-eyes and you’re on exceptionally rare and uncertain ground, indeed.

                       
It seems like astrological factors resemble a toss of the dice, but they don't...you actually know what's coming next...

In astrology, the same thing happens when ordinary combinations turn into the extraordinary…but fortunately, they're not dice.  It’s a lot more predictable (most of it), but only if you’re keeping an eye out and not aren’t lulled into the rhythm of the commonplace. That’s because astrology isn’t about odds, but certainties – you know what’s coming, astronomically at least, as long as you remember to look. This last spring and early summer saw the overlap of half-dozen expected phenomena that individually go mostly unnoticed, but together turned things upside-down in ways that took a lot of people aback, and caught unwary astrologers flat-footed. So they don’t catch you that way, here they are:

Triple Eclipse Season. Every six months there are usually two eclipses, one solar and one lunar, which roil the waters, a sort of silly season where things get turned around when you least expect it, especially if one of the eclipses is on one of your natal degrees. It’s an expected month of gusty weather, astrologically…but this time, there were three eclipses (not common, but not rare, either), so silly season was extended by another two weeks, making it a larger swath of uncertainty for everyone. On top of that, the full Moons of this period were “Supermoons” (closest to the Earth, greatest gravitational force), adding to the intensity.

The Sun blasted us well after everyone thought the sunspot cyle was waning, catching all unawares...

Solar Storm Bonanza. Every eleven or so years the sunspot cycle reaches its peak and resulting solar storms erratically blast the earth with plasma that disrupts more than just satellites and radio signals, to the accompaniment of pretty auroras. It also makes the populus at large more excitable…all kinds of nervous malaises plague the world and it’s been clinically associated with everything from depression to suicide. The first to notice the large-scale revolutionary effect was Alexander Chizhevsky nearly a century ago, and Arab Spring has been just one manifestation of this latest solar storm peak. But this solar cycle peak was expected to have crested last fall. Surprise, it didn’t, and repeated extreme blasts erupting in late spring rocked the boat all around. Just among our clientele alone, we were getting emergency phone calls every time those auroras suddenly – and unexpectedly – flowered way south of normal.

Sky Domination Shift. We’ve been alerting you to the positive, but sometimes unbalancing, emergence of Jupiter as the dominant planet, after a long period of Saturn ruling half the sky half the year, the onset of which brought us the Great Recession. This new development may be good news, but it also has its unsettling side, as we have also pointed out.  See the linked articles for more, but suffice it to say, the weight of circumstances has been suddenly shifting, again rocking your celestial boat.

The Early Void-Of-Course-Moon (VOC). Well, everybody expects things to get a little loose when the Moon goes Void-of-course, the period when the Moon has made its last Ptolemaic aspect before changing signs. It's an unsettled time, every two and a half days, when it’s bad to make commitments or purchases but good to party and create. But usually, that lasts just a few hours, maybe a day at most. But, when all the planets are early in signs (which happens rarely, but just did, as the outer planets were already early, Saturn went retro to early Scorpio, and Jupiter just moved into early Cancer), suddenly the VOC was lasting two days at a time, so reliable times for decisions became rare as hens’ teeth and important decisions were going awry all over the place. So if you weren’t hanging back and partying, enjoying off-the-wall bets at your choice of an mobile casino for the majority of the last several months, you might have been making a big mistake...

An early and long set of Void-of-Course Moons made things totally ungrounded, on shifty soil, for days at a time...

Mercury Retrograde. That’s another really common, expected time of staggering backward and rearranging things that happens three times a year. But in this astrological perfect-storm season, it just added insult to injury throughout most of July, helping amplify the rest of the overlapping phenomena. No sooner done, then undone.

False Security from Big Aspect. When you see one of the biggest, seemingly-mellowest grand trines of the decade coming along – that would be Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune with Mars, Moon and other visitors joining in throughout July – you kind of think that things will be stable and wonderful. But a look at the Prince of  Cambridge’s seemingly-fortuitous natal chart will give you an idea of how seductively illusory that is. Two major T-squares in that chart alone show how much trouble was brewing under the surface, while everyone was looking at the blissful grand trine. The result: the month looked much more peaceful than it turned out, just ask anyone in Egypt.

So, all in all, it’s been a very unsettled spring and summer, mostly thanks to stuff we astrologers normally just take in stride and often dismiss, except when it all happens at once. For those who were on top of this grand surpise, congratulations. For those who were caught unawares, keep a closer watch, the next one could be around the corner…

Readers note: we hope you welcome the occasional mobile casino link in this latest effort (in general we have eschewed all advertising), as it helps keep us afloat. BTW, so does ordering our useful and instructive astrological reports, which are on special 2-for-1 sale, so don’t miss out – go there now!

Post-release curiosity. Just after this was mailed, a sole subscriber pulled out because she disapproved of people spending money on gambling. Fair enough, but this was ironically from a profit-making Down-under Sun-sign and mystic oracles peddlar who BTW also says she loves vegan mixed martial arts (MMA, you know, what George Zimmerman was attempting before he went out and used a gun on Trayvon Martin instead, but vegan?). We suppose in some people's minds paying for a toss of the runes isn't in the least bit like rolling dice, Sun-signs is all there is to astrology, and vegan MMA...well, alas diet can't control everything, or India would have a more peaceful history than it has...;-). Truth trumps fiction, again...

 

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