The astrologer’s gift for prediction derives from insight into an ever-shifting template of time-coded principles. Just as musical symphonies unfold through specific movements, the fabric of time itself is set to motion through key planetary cyclic agents.

At this millennial juncture, we are witnessing an over-lap of a number of critical cycles. Saturn, the planetary lord of karma, (also known as Chronos) presides over time itself. Saturn holds special sway during the reformation process accompanying this millennial transition. There are three critical astrological reasons for this determination. First, a key component of last May’s Taurus stellium (the definitive astrological event of 2000) involved the once-in-twenty year conjunction between Saturn and Jupiter, the “cosmic law and order planets.” Jupiter philosophically resonates with the New Testament, while Saturn links to the Old Testament. These two fundamental schools of faith directly influence the theories and practices of law in most nations. Interpretive trends in law are modified during each interim based on its sign emphasis (great conjunction). The fusion of Jupiter with Saturn during May 2000 in Taurus was ominous. These two last combined in Taurus in 1940, the year the holocaust got fully underway. Its signature includes the greatest heist (against Jewish wealth) in human history. Knowing this conjunction was about to culminate again in the sign with a weakness for money (the love of which is the purported root of all evil) I wondered what form the heist/holocaust would this time take? Within days of the great conjunction (May 28, 2000) the human genome was entirely mapped, and quite soon after our God-given functions became traded property on Wall St.! Jeremy Rifkin, author of The Biotech Century states, “Extending patents to life raises important legal questions.” He goes on to add, “Nearly all genes that make up the genetic blueprints of the human race will have been identified and become the intellectual property of trans-national life science companies.” No wonder arty cows (metaphors of the worship of the Golden Calf ) have suddenly sprouted up all over Manhattan! The night of the genome’s discovery, Larry King interviewed Deepak Chopra and the Dali Lama on his C.N.N. talk-show while a chorus of reporters acted like cheer-leaders, rather than critically informed journalists asking the pertinent moral questions. The Dali Lama wisely related that “intention is not found in the genes.” The combined gravity of seven planets in Taurus made money the bottom line in health care, politics, global ecology, and trade. While much has been touted about this grand new economy and its expansion, let us take a look at the other side of this equation: what has been lost to the temporal illusion of wealth: Examine the Wealth Model the Taurus Tedium has installed:

The seven deadly sins of this new fiscal paradigm:

1. Peace can hardly be found. Poets, mystics, those possessed of introspective natures feel the onslaught of noise, the never-resting vibrational thrombosis of machines, motors, and a basic ubiquitous driving Mars force.

2. Creativity is conspicuous by its absence from modern education. Arts programs are cut so that violent sports arenas may substitute for mass culture. This critical loss will rob the new generation of introspection, intuition, and true insight.

3. Compassion is all but gone from medicine, a field essentially established by Hippocrates who understood that the doctor can only dress the wound, God/Divine Spirit is the healing agent. The for-profit HMO model of medicine steals humanity from this sacred process.

4. Civil liberties have been dangerously eclipsed by a bogus war on drugs that has relaxed basic privacy rights. The irony to the situation is found in the blatant use of smoke and mirrors to cloud public judgment about the far more dangerous pharmaceutical drugs daily being pumped into the market place to drive Wall St. stock averages.

5. Leadership has become little more than puppet theater as those who hold high public office must answer to those who paid their way en route to once honorable seats of public service. The checks and balances of our democratic model have all but broken down.

6. Cancer has become an epidemic. And while various bureaucratic organizations champion finding a cure, a completely irresponsible assortment of chemical polymers are poured into our air, soil, and water eventually absorbed into our fatty tissue. This poisoning of the natural world can only have deleterious consequences to human health. But the laws written to protect the innocent also shield the guilty. Our juridical model is based on proving a singular causative agent beyond a reasonable doubt. The plethora of dangerous substances flagrantly thrown into the public arena make such determinations impossible, as each trespasser safeguards the other with illusory impunity.

7. Thanks to NAFTA and treaties which favor multi-national corporations, labor has lost its fundamental bargaining chip against the gravity of capital’s enormous power.

8. We may also be witnessing the historical purchase power of a United States presidential election. While neither Gore nor Bush is any prize when it comes to sane environmental policies, talks at the Hague recently broke down (November 2000) when the world’s most industrialized nations--primarily the U.S--refused to sign the Kyoto protocol asking for modest toxic emission reductions. Journalist Ed Vulliamy of the London Observer says, “If ever there was a president defined by his donors and patrons, it is Bush. Like a player in a baroque allegorical drama, he is not really a person, more a personification of interests.” Vulliamy adds, “to most Washingtonians, Texas--with its 1.4 million children without health insurance, squandered surplus, appalling pollution record, exaggerated school standards, housing crisis, and execution factory is not an alluring model for America.” What hope for establishing protocols to stabilize climate patterns worldwide? In my previous article: The Millennial Challenge (Dell: May 2000) I stated that the “cosmic cross eclipse” of August l999 would strain all four elements, and earth mother would experience severe climatic hot flashes. Nine months later the great Taurus stellium manifested, and weather patterns on a global scale have rapidly deteriorated. President George W. Bush says he doesn’t “believe in global warming,” even though his home state of Texas “enjoyed” over thirty successive days with temperatures exceeding one hundred degrees! Denial is a major perceptual weapon aimed at preserving a very precarious “status quo.” Back in Biblical times citizens were able to ascertain the will of God from the signs demonstrated in the heavens and on earth. Now we are told that our concern for the environment, for the probable link between mankind’s actions and climatic responses is mere superstition. Although many weather catastrophes have occurred since August l999, the full impact of tell tale astrological signatures has not entirely manifested. It’s as if mankind is being extended a period of Grace. One nation slated for enormous internal unrest based on the Taurus alignment was Israel: its inception date being May l8, l948. During last May’s Taurus line-up Israel was calm as a lagoon. Many astrologers expected meteoric perturbations on Wall St., but the stock market remained remarkably stable. It was not until Saturn turned retrograde back to 28 degrees Taurus in November 2000 that Israel exploded, the election fiasco began, and Wall St. began to rock and roll. Why is Saturn so important? We must look back to understand the undulating wave cycles which combine to produce historical events. The last major stellium among planets (six plus the node) occurred in Capricorn during the eclipse of January l5, l991. On that very day the Gulf War was declared. This stellar event still dominates the global agenda. While many of us are waiting for clear and evident signs that the Aquarian Age is fully underway, a surreptitious secondary event took place in 1994 which appears to be holding back the intended progress. I call it the great filibuster. Saturn, as ruler of Capricorn, entered into Pisces, the sign of the Age intended for closure; while that sign’s ruler, Neptune, maintained its fourteen year passage across Capricorn. The party line or mutual reception between these two planets put Aquarius into the cosmic squeeze. 1994 is the year the U.S. government shut down, and Newt Gingrich turned the clock back with his regressive “contract with America.” Recently Dick Cheney was quoted as saying, “We may be on the front edge of a recession.” Thomas Frank, author of One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and The End of Economic Democracy (Doubleday 2000) questions the presumption that “markets are identifiable with the ‘will of the people’.” He states that our current version of turbo-capitalism has actually led to l0% of Americans controlling 90% of the nation’s wealth. CEO compensation has skyrocketed rising from 85 times the average blue collar worker’s pay to 475 times that amount by 1999! Most Americans continue to live from paycheck to paycheck, union membership has crashed, 15% of the population is currently without health insurance, thousands of American former jobs have been exported overseas. Americans are also running up record levels of debt. Over the past decade real wages have destabilized while heads of industry in America have been made far richer than their European counterparts. Those who protest the policies which fuel this new economy risk arrest; and prison infrastructure has already been established to limit human rights. Record numbers of U.S. citizens are now incarcerated, and civil liberties have been dangerously eclipsed; standardized education is turning our nation’s youth into cerebral clones, and the necessary vigilance to sustain a healthy democratic society raises issues about the “free” press. Tom Rosenstiel of The Los Angeles Times states (11/15/2000) “Today the notion that the press is an independent institution, a reputation that was hard won over one hundred fifty years is eroding. This is occurring not only in the political arena, but also in the economic world where journalism is becoming a subsidiary to larger corporate interests such as ABC, inside Disney or Time, Inc. Inside of AOL.” Having done research on long-term Pluto cycles for my upcoming book (Pluto: The Alchemy of Fusion), it becomes obvious that once Pluto enters Capricorn in 2007 to eventually join forces with Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars by 2019 global government may further reflect this big business ethos. To my mind global industries resemble the new Pharaohs, but the world’s citizens do not recognize themselves as slaves due to the ingenious diversionary tactic known as shopping! Sadly the next conjunction between Jupiter and Saturn does not occur until December 2020 at zero degrees of Aquarius exactly twenty-nine years (a Saturn return) after the Capricorn alignment of January 1991! With Pluto empowering the outer planets in the repressive sign of Capricorn, can the world afford another twenty years of global decision making which turns the wealthy against the weak? Or a pro-business Supreme Court that acts to decimate the rights of citizens without due concern for global environmental devastation? According to The Center for Economic and Policy Research there is no region of the world that the World Bank can point to as a success with respect to its trade and loan policies. Worldwide protests are growing against W.T.O and biotech foods (especially in Europe). Over one hundred nations gathered at the Hague in November to work on the problem of global warming since recent weather trends are proving catastrophic to many nations. The United States is a chief offender and refuses to sign. Our leaders remain indentured to oil, coal, and the automobile industries! Since the August l999 eclipse more than thirty severe weather events occurred.Here are ten for those with short memories:

9. Earth Mother’s Top Ten Hot Flashes:

1. Freak tornado hits Salt Lake City, Utah

2. A huge windstorm destroys century-old trees around Versailles Castle in France in Winter l999

3. Vietnam experiences the worst flooding in thirty years from typhoon rain

4. Venezuela receives twenty-seven inches of rain and 35,000 are made homeless.

5. Fires burn in ten U.S. states calling for emergency fire-fighting efforts on the part of the National Guard in August 2000

6. Hurricane Floyd (September l999) calls for the largest Eastern seaboard peace time evacuation in history

7. Huge earthquakes hit Turkey

8. Quakes hit Taiwan

9. The Iceland Glacier melts substantially

l0. A gigantic hole in the earth’s ozone layer opens over South America.

When business sets the global agenda and money is the basis for all decision-making, worse environmental calamities become the inevitable outcome. Business is sacred unto Capricorn, and the power this sign wields over global events is significant. Recalling “the filibuster,” we must view the current political drama from the perspective of the heavens. The ongoing election fiasco helps to set the tone for the new millennium. What might this deadlock symbolize on a cosmic level? Does it not state unequivocally that the values drawn from The Age of Pisces no longer serve humanity. This gridlock acts to subsume the Aquarian values of Truth, liberty, and the opportunity for a nation’s citizens to fulfill their God-given right to the pursuit of happiness. The Aquarian Age is laboring to be born in a time of chaos and contradiction. Only those with eyes to see can find the truth. Political and social agendas are rife with denial, fitting paradigms for the Piscean Age with its ready trends toward escapist behavior. Divine cosmic choreography provided a repeat symbolic set of “Stars over Bethlehem” to signal the intended onset of The Aquarian Age. In January l996 Uranus entered Aquarius (as that first star), to be followed by Jupiter entering Aquarius in January 1997 (as second “star”); and finally Neptune entered for its first visit in 165 years in January of l998 to complete the trinity. Of course while Aquarius champions Truth and the truth shall set us free from bondage to a dying age and its deadly perceptions, a great many citizens are lost in a fog, or being chemically managed for the canary-in-the-coal-mine symptoms they exhibit!

While Aquarius represents the highest octave of the air element, facilitating immediate transport of ideas via the Internet (born when Uranus and Neptune began passages across this sign), Mercury rules the base octave of the air element through Gemini, where it certainly is kicking up plenty of communication havoc and dust! With the planets veritable agents of Divine will, Creator has demonstrated a great sense of humor with regard to this election drama! Mercury may well be putting on his best retrograde show ever! Will those incredulous to astrology find a better explanation for the election fiasco? The number of newspaper chains forced to print second and third editions of post election copy are legend as actual events defied their deadline predictions. It’s more than coincidental that Florida is a Pisces state, and that Ralph Nader (who acquired 97,000 votes in Florida) is a Pisces native who clamored, “Vote your dreams” adding to the dualistic outcome! If Nader is correct that both political parties essentially follow the same marching orders, than how apt that no clear-cut election result could be honestly ascertained. Both parties represent the same agenda! The illusion is that there are two parties, when in truth they have both morphed into one at the centrist mid-point! We may well be witnessing a fable in progress as the 21rst century gets underway. In this modern cautionary tale, a brother greases the apparatus of his state’s machine to ensure that his brother gains the presidential throne. He doesn’t know that a certain political prophecy surrounds the fateful conjunction between Saturn and Jupiter (also linking with the eclipse cycle of l9.5 years). Beginning with the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, presidents elected to office at those intervals died (or were killed) in office. Ronald Reagan was of course shot, but he survived his assassin. Astrologers have pointed out that Reagan’s fate was spared as the conjunction of l980 was “a mutation,” or out of the earth sign sequence. That will not be the case in 2000. None of us knows the will of Creator, but should this prophecy be invoked, the greedy tale of two brothers will work to seat the wrong man in the hot seat when fate’s ambush is ready to be delivered! (Arthur Miller’s famous play All My Sons deals with such a twist of fate and holds a parallel with this situation.) A new fable of two brothers has been set into motion just when Saturn and Jupiter began marking their joint venture(s) across Gemini, the sign of siblings! At the time of this writing, current news headlines raises serious doubts about the Supreme Court. The Boston Globe offers its lead story, The Court That Throttled Democracy appearing on December 13, 2000. Jessie Jackson warns of a racial divide emerging from this election result.

The sign of Pisces stands ninety degrees away from both Gemini and Sagittarius where a great deal of planetary traffic will be congested during the first half of 2001.

As we watch the election debacle, and historical weather cycles come apart at the seams,
we are advised to understand that the illusions of this dying age no longer serve the population. Fate can be cruel to be kind in delivering the blow of truth necessary for the massive Aquarian Age awakening. Those born under mutable signs are going to face paradox in themselves, or reflected poignantly at them through complex life events. And those identified with partisan politics or religious belief systems will see these thrown into conundrums by national events!

Ordinarily Venus spends about one month in a sign. She will be in fiery Aries from February 3-June 6, 2001. Ordinarily Mars spends about two months in a sign; but this god of war will be in fiery Sagittarius from February 15- September 8, 2001. Mars will move into close proximity with Pluto (a very volatile, dangerous combination) during March and July of 2001. Meanwhile the fateful planets of law and order find their opposite natures exaggerated as they share passages through the sign of Gemini. Saturn and Jupiter will essentially oppose Pluto and Mars in signs related to ideology, law, and the transmission of knowledge/information. The split between these signs points to an ongoing ideological civil war. These signs also deal with internet commerce, the publishing industry, and international trade. Expect major legal battles to ensue. Furthermore, where air and fire signs speed up behavior, water (empathy) and earth signs (costs) draw more reflection. True believers from political parties will never take this election’s outcome seriously. There are too many shady factors, too much Piscean duplicity and subterfuge at work. As a Pisces state, Florida meets its astrological reputation for “fishy business.” A British columnist suggested that the U.S. is copying England by substituting its own royal family coronation. It stated further that Europe would doubt the legitimacy of a Bush presidency. Since so many Americans have fallen to the enthrall of sports (even down to the Anheiser Bush sponsorship of the Presidential debate!) I wondered how many U.S. citizens might have been satisfied to see Bush and Gore “duke it out in the ring for the Title!” Keep in mind that Jupiter ruled both Pisces and Sagittarius before the discovery of Neptune. Sports may currently serve as the new opiate of the peoples!

It will be interesting to watch the events catalyzed during Spring 2001 (and 2002 when Saturn kicks in to replace Jupiter) as volatile energy is generated by fire and air planetary combinations, especially when the Gemini/Sagittarius polarity kicks into high gear in March and July of 200l.

The astrologer can offer much insight at such a time. The Piscean Age saw to it that knowledge was set into such specific categories and disciplines that few minds prove capable of ascertaining the big picture, the pattern behind it all. This is where the astrologer stands back from the big equation to lift others to that view intrinsically designed to transcend the moment’s fashionable, trendy illusions. As the eleventh sign principle, Aquarius celebrates advanced thinkers. Time itself travels in a circle, and Truth must take us back to our primal origins. To set the world rightly, we must learn to see it rightly. This requires a global endeavor aimed at developing viable bottom line quality of life ethics respected by all nations. As natives of fixed signs learned over the past two years (from the eclipse of l999 and the Saturn/Uranus square) it’s time to drop previous scripts. This is the only way that mass catharsis can create the critical mass (in consciousness) necessary for shifting the ideological template. Otherwise it’s pretty clear that mankind is aiming full speed ahead at environmental, global, and political destruction. We do not have to buy into the current model. There are twelve Divine Paths, one intended to govern each age. The Piscean Age is indeed closing so that Aquarius can open. The flux and paradox which will be generated next year as Saturn-Jupiter Gemini come into opposition with Mars-Pluto Sagittarius will further tear illusions (and the institutions based upon these) asunder. Much is coming apart at the seems/seams! Neptune’s passage through Aquarius tells us it is time to reconfigure the shared dream.

Part of this process comes from balancing profit and material gain against the more lasting riches which serve the greater good of humanity. A healthy Aquarian Age must keep heart (Leo) in the balance! Were we to teach youngsters the continuity of the soul, we might set the groundwork for those global ethics intended to preserve Gaia/Eden. For if life itself resembles the popular time share resort proposition, then if you are destined to return to this planet, why not keep it wonderful, majestic, true to Creator’s design! The Piscean Age has largely come to create crises which some find profit in managing. The Chinese I Ching tells of a far wiser path to conservation in Hexagram/Kua #43. Addressing the age-old problem of evil it simply and succinctly states that “evil cannot BE fought.” To engage in the struggle means one can only remain there. The I Ching instead suggests building new alternatives, what metaphysical author Emmet Fox called “new mental equivalents,” and what Jesus probably meant when he said “Cast your nets to the other side.” To mend the broken template of our world (and in many instances ourselves) we must call back the intuitive voices, those capable of understanding the ancient links, poetic enough to honor the sacred relationships intrinsic to all species within the Divinely woven web of life. The Taurus line-up has given paper money the power to subsume all other values and considerations. At such times law itself becomes the vehicle of injustice. At one time slavery was legal, so was the burning of witches. A democratic society requires the kind of vigilance no longer possible when so many tools of Piscean subterfuge arm against the Truth. Indeed very troubling events are afoot in our world while society looks the other way. Millions are being made sick by dangerous chemicals irresponsibly used; food can barely constitute any previous definition of sound nourishment; prisons are being built with new offenders daily invented; schools are unsafe when culture champions violence as entertainment; The Supreme Court itself subverts the will of voters; and the natural world is dying in far too many places. When mankind allows its laws and lawmakers to fall into complicity with such destruction, they invite back the very lesson the Atlanteans failed to learn. I will close with a quote from Edgar Cayce taken from Edgar Cayce on Atlantis by Edgar Evans Cayce (1968): “ In Atlantean land when there were those activities that caused the first upheavals and the use of those influences that brought destruction to the land—among those of the law of one but was persuaded by and with leaders of the land to apply spiritual laws for material gain—brought or aided in bringing what eventually became the destruction of the material lands.” Cayce stressed the importance of ideals, as Jesus taught that two or more gathered could change events miraculously with minds aligned towards a common positive goal. We must change the collective channel on mankind’s screen if we wish to invoke a more auspicious global future. The Zero point has come. Mother Nature cannot wait much longer for mankind to wake up to its gifts and responsibilities.