Venus is a glimmering diamond in our skies and her beautiful, cyclical dance with the Sun, as seen from our perspective on Earth, inspired ancient people to dub her with such lovely titles as Queen of Heaven. The ancients watched Venus alternate between her visible and invisible phases, when she regally shines in the night sky, she is Hesperos, when she dares to grace the morning skies before the Sun, she is Lucifer (bringer of light), and when her glimmer is absent from our skies, she visits her dark sister, Ereshkigal, in the Underworld.
Unlike the erratic and less predictable cycle of her cosmic lover Mars, Venus’ dance with the Sun creates a 584-day cycle as measured from one conjunction -when Venus is aligned with the Sun - to the next. During her inferior conjunctions, Venus is directly in between the Earth and the Sun and during her superior conjunctions, Venus is directly behind the Sun from Earth’s vantage point. She alternates between being invisible - when she’s in front of (60 days) or behind the Sun (7-8 days) because the Sun’s glare blots out her sparkle - and visibly shining in the night skies (260 days) or morning skies (260 days).
Read MoreOk. It’s time to reflect, integrate and summarize my experiences from this accelerated weekend of astrological immersion. Let’s start from the beginning.
I wake up early with ease. My partner is having a rough 4 am start but he drives me to the airport and leaves me with a sweet kiss and kind but smoldering eyes. The security line is surprisingly long for such an early flight so I gather my courage and ask a burly, bearded man if I can cut in front of him. He gracefully lets me pass him and we chat about his work: he explores territory all over the world for mining developments and has lived for a few months in several interesting places, such as Siberia! I feel grateful for his kindness and calmness in letting me rush ahead to my flight.
Read MoreI need to share a little story about how astrology shows up in my life. Last weekend, I started listening to Annie Lennox – I’d heard her music and her name before but never really connected all of her great songs together and attributed them to her and her overall collection. In fact, when I was 14 or so, I did a jazz dance with a few girls to Annie’s fantastic track, Little Bird, which is now a sure song on my life’s soundtrack. It was a fantastic number and we wore these strange, white, feather-covered unitards that gave us a most unfortunate case of camel toe, but anyway, back to my astrology story…
Read MoreAstrology is an enigma. Many people write it off as superstitious pseudoscience, often with good reason. After all pop astrology and watered-down weekly horoscopes are not illustrious examples of the depth and precision of analysis that is available to the skilled astrologer.
I’m not sure how many people realize and appreciate the incredible impact that astrology has had on modern thought; it’s truly staggering. Let’s explore a very brief list:
- Holidays we celebrate – Indeed most of our holidays, such as Easter and Christmas, were co-opted by Christians from astrological belief systems
- Days of the week – Monday/Moon’s day; Tuesday/Mars’ day; Wednesday; Mercury’s day; and so on
- Bible – the bible is JAM PACKED with astrological allusion. For example, the three wise men who arrived to greet Jesus were astrologers and based on their astrological analyses, they were some of the first people to know – based on their interpretation of the sky – that a king had been born!
Read MoreDid you know that today, April 16, 2015, marks the 72nd anniversary of Dr. Albert Hoffman’s accidental discovery of the powerful hallucinogen LSD?
In celebration of this pivotal day in the history of human consciousness, I’ve done a brief analysis of Dr. Hoffman’s astrology chart.
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