{Blog originally posted on Hominy Creek Horoscopy, 5/13/2017}
This date marks the centennial event of three children– once called “Spiritual Prodigies”, now Saints–who received a series of visions of the Immaculate Heart of Mother Mary. A pair of siblings plus a cousin, the brother and sister Francisco and Jacinta died very young as a result of the Influenza epidemic. After death, Jacinta was exhumed twice, and observed to have remained in the exalted state of corporo incorrupto: miraculously preserved as a site of terrestrial blessing for those with faith.
The astrology of Grace is a method made for exactly these sorts of charts, ones that show that regardless of which tradition visionaries come from, the planets can tell their story. In the natal charts of Saint Francisco and Saint Jacinta of Fatima, we find a delightfully precise application of Centaurs and Goddess Asteroids, found at the right degrees. These clear patterns continue through the events of their first Mary vision, and most importantly at their reception of the “Three Secrets of Fatima”.
On the date of their reported First Vision on May 13, 1917, Altjira, trans-Neptunian holder of timeless wisdom, transited the Pleiadian degree of the Divine Mother, 4 Aquarius, symbolized by “People lined up to receive hugs from a holy woman.” The more precisely transiting Mercury, messenger of the gods, is symbolized by “A youth handing a rose to a vestal virgin.”
The elder child, Francisco, is born with healing-mother-goddess Chariklo at 25 Pisces, the Degree of the Oracle (so named for it holding space for the later discovery of Okyrhoe, the prophetic daughter of Chiron and Chariklo). This is the Key Degree for the Astrology of Grace. His younger sister Jacinta, fated to become the incorruptible Saint, took birth with Altjira at the degree symbolized by “A woman being interviewed for a position as Priestess.”
At the date of his first Vision, transits to Francisco’s birth include the vividly visionary Okyrhoe to Altjira, granting a lens into the timeless; and the enigmatic charge of inspiration from Uranus to Chiron. That year Pluto voyaged between Francisco’s Okyrhoe-Node conjunction, itself iconic for a boy fated to be a visionary prodigy.
Jacinta’s most potent transit that day 100 years ago was an exact meeting of wisdom-guide Chiron to her natal holder of intuitive goddess-power Chariklo–a meeting of shamanic husband and wife. Blessings-maidenFortuna coincided with her natal sacrament pairing of Ceres-Vesta, bringing that natal potential to the event-level. Mid-Life Point North Node of the Moon fell on 25 Pisces, the Degree of the Oracle. Mid-lifeUranus at the Divine Mother Degree explains her role in this shocking discovery, in harmony with the event’s visionary potential enacted by Altjira.
When, two months later, the children received the apocalyptic Three Secrets of Fatima from Mother Mary, each child also received a distinctly prophetic and rare transit. Francisco was blessed by Okyrhoe to Uranus (plus 7 more exact hits to natal planets and asteroids). His saintly sister Jacinta was blessed by Chiron, now joined by Fortuna, at her own Chariklo. Such a transit, rare in such a short life span, is one when a wisdom holder may come into her own. At the last degree of the Zodiac, Chiron-Fortuna is symbolized by“A seer, on his back and gazing into the sky, becomes a channel for cosmic messages.”
And, in a meeting of asteroids which were the archetypal basis for this astrology of grace, Hebe goddess of youth (implying immortality) had just met with Jacinta’s natal Okyrhoe, giver of visionary prophecies such as these Secrets. Thus, a gradual Chiron transit, which was in effect all summer, was timed more precisely by quicker Goddess-asteroids Fortuna and Hebe as they aligned to her Centaurs of Prophetic Healing, Chariklo and Okyrhoe.
I pray that under the compassionate leadership of Pope Francis, we may see the continued rise of the Goddess of Love and Mercy in all of her guises, including that which appeared to Saint Francisco and Saint Jacinta of Fatima.
{This article originally published on my Hominy Creek Horoscopy Blog 4/19/17}
Bicycle Day… April 19, 1943: Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman takes the first intentional trip on LSD. 4:20 PM. Part of Fortune, 16° Pisces: “A river of ideas and images entering our reality.” –Pleiadian Degree Series
On that date, Chiron was moving especially slowly in the sky. The not-yet-discovered astral harbinger of new consciousness and healing was days away from ‘stationing direct’. That means, from the point of view of Earth, Chiron was hovering, nearly still, as if it were taking a moment of rest from its path around the Sun. The Wounded Healer held a message in his hooves.
But there’s more: Chiron was at the point in the zodiac where the Moon’s orbit would make its upward slice across the path of the sun, as viewed from Earth. This point, the North Node of the Moon, holds the place of our collective destiny, a blinking neon arrow pointing out the most beneficial path forward. That week of LSD’s foray into public life, Chiron pivoted into forward motion from that zodiacal place, 23° Leo. This is within a couple degrees of Albert Hofmann’s own North Node. Synchronicity. The message found its recipient.
Albert rode his bicycle home from the lab, publicly experiencing the world’s first LSD hallucinations. Traveling down a familiar road, he navigated new inner worlds while somehow maintaining balance on his bicycle.
On this eventful day, the scientist was undergoing a few curious astral influences from the Centaurs.
As mentioned, Chiron, leader of the wise Centaurs, was conjunct his natal North Node. Okyrhoe, Chiron’s oracular daughter, was within a couple degrees of his Chiron. Pholus, Chiron’s friend who held the corked bottle of the gods’ ambrosia, transited just past his Sun.
Three days before, when Albert touched his face after handling the chemical, thereby setting off the first (accidental) acid trip, Mercury the messenger transited his Okyrhoe, giver of visions.
The unintentional psychedelic explorer reported: “At home I lay down and sank into a not unpleasant intoxicated-like condition, characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination. In a dreamlike state, with eyes closed… I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors.”
When Hofmann first synthesized the chemical, five years before, Chiron was transiting his own Neptune. The genesis of psychedelia is a perfect realm to witness how this pack of Centaurs activates our higher potentials!
Outer planets Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto were definitely pulling their psychedelic weight, too. The carriers of intuitive sparks (Uranus) and altered-perceptions (Neptune) were supporting his Moon (mental states) with equal aspects of 60° on either side, while Pluto was wrapping up a yearlong process of taking that mind down to its very depths… Like Chiron, Pluto also stationed direct later that week, slowing down with all its psychic weight to a few degrees of his Moon. Here the work of the slow planets point to the deeper architecture of the soul that Earth’s Moon regulates. Pluto-Moon contacts are psychic disruptors; with Chiron also at the Node of the Moon (his, and ours), the higher dimensions of this breakthrough led to universal effects well beyond the personal.
Hofmann was a buttoned-up man of research. Yet following this Pluto/Chiron transit and the discoveries they brought, he went on to research entheogens with indigenous shamans, cooperating in the extraction of the psilocybin mushroom’s active compound.
The Godfather of psychedelia remained serious about the Plutonic dangers of his “problem child”, and did not agree with the indulgences of Tim Leary or the Merry Pranksters. Nonetheless, he was instrumental in generations of psychonauts tuning in & turning on.
Transits (Outer Wheel) to Hofmann’s natal (Inner Wheel: January 11, 1906, 3 PM Basel, Switzerland)
{Originally posted on Hominy Creek Horoscopy’s blog 1/18/2018}
Over the last six years we have been blessed by Neptune’s presence in his strongest sign, Pisces. On the physical level this invites an increase in flood-like phenomena, while on the energetic level, in his own sign, Neptune opens the floodgates of grace for the spiritually sensitive. Chiron presently shares this watery space, but these two spiritual planets will not conjoin at any point of their Piscean sojourn between 2010-2018. They last met in late Aquarius back in 2010. Let’s give Chiron a retrospective before he moves into Aries this April.
Engraving from Apocalypsis, or The revelation of certain notorious advancers of heresie. London, 1655. Scan provided by the Mennonite Archives of Ontario .
Tracing their past activity together in Pisces can illuminate their present vibrations. In fact it’s quite rare for the two to make actual contact in Pisces. In the last five hundred years this has taken place only twice: in 1528, and 1862. Upon investigating, it turns out that both of these dates feature extraordinarily apt events of a Chironian-Neptunian nature.
In 1528, two key events are remembered in European history. England faced a summertime epidemic of “sweating sickness”: it can’t get much more blendy between these protagonists than a ‘wound’ of a ‘moist’ nature. The very Neptunian disease, causing fever, shivers, exhaustion and profuse sweating, reared its sickly head throughout the reign of Henry VIII but only reached epidemic heights when Chiron and Neptune conjoined that year in 1528.
Earlier that same year, Protestant martyr Balthasar Hubmaier was burned at the stake for the crime of espousing anabaptist heresies. What was his capital offense to Catholic doctrine? The belief that an adult should decide whether to be baptised (Neptune/Pisces) as a believer in order to proclaim his own Christian faith (Chiron/Pisces).
When the cycle came around again in the sign of the Fishes, record amounts of rainfall in Northern California swelled into the Great California Flood of early 1862, when water levels at one fork of the American River rose by 35 feet.
Sacramento, 1862
And as for this iteration of Neptune-Chiron in Pisces, well the waters sure are rising, and often tragically. Maybe we owe the fact that we haven’t all sunk this time around, to how these two watery planets have not actually crossed paths in the oceanic sign. Yet with the rising earthly tides, has come a definite Chironian urge to awakening, which has allowed quests to proceed into new depths of Piscean awareness all the while.
With Chiron crossing the Aries point in a few short months, we might see a galvanized spiritual leadership emerge. We might even become those leaders. We might have to!
Praise Kheiron Phillyrides, Kentaur of Mount Pelion, Son of Kronos, Son of Ouranos. You bring the moment to its peak. Holder of Harp and Herb, healer with sound and plant. Mentor and sage, friend of humanity. Your skilled hands guide us in ways of healing.
In the later part of his life, depth psychologist Carl Jung slipped through Chariklo’s veil during a Near Death Experience. After a heart attack, and following a fall that required hospitalization, he drifted into a coma (February 21, 1944) in which he astral-traveled into space, looked down at the earth, and found his way to a dream-asteroid which housed a temple meant entirely for his spiritual enlightenment.
Carl Jung’s NDE took place against the backdrop of a deeply evolutionary world transit: Pluto retrograde crossed the North Node of the Moon. This key transit was exact throughout the month of Jung’s ordeal. Transiting Pluto at the North Node would have made death the topic du jour. For Dr. Jung, Pluto-Node aligned within a few degrees of his natal Sun (born July 26, 1875), so the collective trend became personal as he experienced a classic Near Death Experience.
Now we can see how the event was completely Centauric, both archetypally and astrologically. The Centaur’s realm includes NDE phenomena like this one. Hooves on the Earth, head in the clouds of Olympus, the Centaur’s existence is half-in/half-out. This is the primal ‘wound’ the Centaur heals: learning to enjoy complete embodiment on Earth in alignment with one’s highest spiritual principles.
Astrologically, the evolutionary dyad of Pluto-Node joined in a precise opposition to transiting Centaur Okyrhoe: visions (Okyrhoe) of near-death (Pluto) experience (Node). Yet even more to the point, Pluto and the Node were found exactly at the future discovery degree of Chiron’s partner (and Okyrhoe’s mother) Chariklo. The astrological functions of Chariklo, according to Philip Sedgwick, include ‘boundaries’ and ‘energy healing’. I gloss these as the ‘energy body’, the subtle body that is the site of healing.
Seen in the life of Jung, this planetary formation gives new meaning to the Pleiadian symbol of Chariklo’s discovery degree, “A man’s astral body travels into the sky to see the stars more closely.” We can see how evocative this symbol becomes in light of Jung’s report when he awoke: “It seems to me that I was high up in space. Far below I saw the globe of the earth, bathed in a gloriously blue light.” (Memories, Dreams, Reflections)
(Here is also a fine example of how the Sabian symbols’ often bare descriptions can become more specifically meaningful after receiving further Pleiadian detail. Compare Sabian Leo 7: “The constellations in the sky” with Pleiadian, “A man’s astral body travels into the sky to see the stars more closely.”) Thanks to John Sandbach, channeler of the Pleiadian Degree Symbols.
From this degree of shamanic Chariklo, the Node of the Moon (and Pluto) reigned over Carl Jung’s transformative NDE. The astral body, as the form of subtle body that leaves the physical boundary of flesh, was the vehicle for Jung’s spiritual adventure. Chariklo embodies this archetype in both her astral activity and discovery degree symbolism. In his brilliant retelling of the NDE vision, Jung recalls:
“As I approached the temple I had the certainty that I was about to enter an illuminated room and would meet there all those people to whom I belong in reality. There I would at last understand – this too was a certainty – what historical nexus I or my life fitted into. I would know what had been before me, why I had come into being, and where my life was flowing.”
Could we hope to read a more clear description of the astrological North Node than this? The natal North Node is considered by evolutionary astrologers to hold the key to fulfilling one’s destiny or purpose. Carl Jung’s Node at 11 Aries, symbolized as “A flickering fire creates the illusion of laughter as it reflects off a golden effigy.” The astral traveller came to visit a large stone asteroid which was the site of his spiritual inheritance, and sure fits this description: He saw a
“Hindu… in lotus posture upon a stone bench. He wore a white gown, and I knew that he expected me. Two steps led up to this antechamber, and inside, on the left, was the gate to the temple. Innumerable tiny niches, each with a saucer-like concavity filled with coconut oil and small burning wicks, surrounded the door with a wreath of bright flames.”
In my research of well over one hundred visionary and mystical experiences, I have found a simple method to chart these peak events in relation to the people who undergo them. In Jung’s case, this method again highlights the role of Chariklo as the centaur of energy bodies. In the style of Davison’s Relationship Charts, we can check the mid-point in time and space between the visionary’s birth and major life event. This chart is a kind of Centauric Progression, the half-time date between birth and peak. To continue with the Jung example, which has already shown so much resonance with the Lady Centaurs: we find mid-life point Chariklo exactly at 25° 00’ Pisces. This is the degree at which (in 1998) Okyrhoe, oracular daughter of Chiron and Chariklo, was discovered.
To recap: transiting Okyrhoe was exactly opposite Chariklo’s discovery degree, and “Centaur-progressed” Chariklo was exactly at Okyrhoe’s discovery degree. Yet of course, neither of these planets had even been discovered yet when this event transpired. Could it be that Jung’s life story itself fits into our history as an archetypal case of the Chariklo-Okyrhoe experience?
In his Hymns to the Ancient Gods Michael Harding suggests that by imagining some kind of a primal zodiac, “we could visualize that on this collective chart is described the psychic history of our planet.” Actually, Harding’s purpose in that book is to interrogate some of Carl Jung’s most famous ideas.
To Harding, what Jung called archetypes are actually just the planets, encoded in memory on a ‘primal zodiac’. His argument suggests that as astrologers, there is no need for us to draw on some difficult-to-define collective unconscious: such a thing exists, in real space and time, in our experience of the planets traversing the zodiac. A primal zodiac could make sense in light of this kind of investigation into discovery degrees. We can see how this kind of cosmic background could serve as “an image of an infinite synastry with our total history.” (Hymns to the Ancient Gods)
It is fitting that the person who gave us the terms ‘collective unconscious’ and ‘archetypes’ serves by example of his life story to ground our application of the astrological planets in the place of these concepts. As Harding concluded,
“Such a collective zodiac, on which we originally might draw all our initial energies and to which our subsequent expression of their principles ultimately returns, presents a psychic equivalent to the genetic pool in which we might create our collective and individual destinies.” (Hymns 106)
Isaac Newton believed the stars were delineated into distinct constellations by the sage Chiron. Now that we have discovered planets the dominion of which we grant to Chiron and kin, we are able to track such movements against a map of Chiron’s own devising, the signs of the zodiac.
A putative primal zodiac does not need to exist anywhere in reality for it to have symbolic power. And it is not made of the stars that have shifted from their once-aligned geocentric view (via precession). After all, whether wrought by God or by diverse human imaginations, constellations are shapes we impute from our perspective in space and time. The energy fields of the zodiac of signs exist as the psychic reality that relates the spiritual world with our embodied experience of life on planet Earth. Although the zodiac abides nowhere really, the real planets reveal its meaning.
NATAL PLANETS AT FUTURE DISCOVERY DEGREES
Jung’s own chart finds synastry with the discovery degrees, past and future, of four additional new planets:
Natal Venus at 18 Cancer (Discovery of Pluto)
Saturn at 25 Aquarius (conjunct Neptune) (~Saturn Return of Neptune discovery)
Neptune at 4 Taurus (Chiron)
Pluto at 24 Taurus (Ceres)
If we view the discovery degree as a planet’s holographic point of zodiacal potency, conjunctions to these show affinity not unlike conjunction to the actual planet in a chart. At least it imbues some of the discovered planet’s flavor to the natal planet. Maybe it remembers, or predicts, how the natal planet will act in the life of the native.
In the example of Jung’s birth, the conjunction of Neptune to Chiron’s future place of discovery can indicate how his own spiritualideals intuitively connected him to the role of healing mentor; or, at another Chiron-level, indicating his own unconscious (Neptune) wounds (Chiron).
The Centaur Space 