Hudson Valley Astrologer

Late Saturday night, on April 20, 2024 at around 10:25 PM est Jupiter will be conjunct with Uranus, I almost wrote collide, but of course that won’t happen because these two planets are almost one and a half million miles apart; two behemoths that run in different circles. We also would never see Uranus pass in front of Jupiter the way the featured image of this post suggests, because such a perspective would require you to stand on Neptune or Pluto. In other words we would be looking at these giants from an entirely new point of view. Maybe that isn’t such a bad idea, to reconsider all we know, and to look at life from another angle.

I suppose that I should get excited, this epic conjunction will be within a hair’s breadth of my descendant, and square my natal Peregrine Uranus which is in the 9h house. Jupiter is closing in fast on Uranus in terms of its angularity as seen from Earth, less than 28 minutes of longitude in separation as I type this on Friday, which is the equivalent of 32 miles or so at the equator, but remember there is more than one and a half million miles of space between the planet called the second Sun, and the planet that represents what is new, and radically transformed. Jupiter and Uranus revolve around the Sun in the 5th and 7th orbits of the solar system respectively, with Saturn in between them.

What we can say about this configuration is that it is a BIG DEAL! And we can stop there. But there always seems more to say with astrology and especially with these two planets in combination who together seem to thrive on hype and exaggeration. So we ought to be ready for the BIG EVENT, and it probably goes without saying that we’ve been under its spell for a while. The stock market has raced to all time new highs, artificial intelligence is exploding, and oh, Taylor Swift dropped not one but TWO new albums last night. It’s like more is more, and more than that is is even better. Are we talking radical truth here or bloviated sincerity that sells because, well “Breaking Up is Hard to Do” (Which happens to be the title of the #1 song in 1962 by Neil Sedaka). Now the rest of the world knows what Swifties have known all along, “there ain’t no such thing as too much of a good thing.” Even heartbreaks, which for Taylor Swift is the gift that keeps on giving. But there is of course more to this story of Jupiter and Uranus, and before we go off kilter celebrating America’s lovelorn daughter on the rebound let’s remember that there is an election looming here in the United States which is another kind of performance altogether, that perhaps is less about radical truth than it is about breaking new boundaries in the realm of hype and exaggeration – so, Buckle Up!.

Yes BIG THINGS are happening, and my chart is no less immune to the vibrations than anyone else’s, but the unapologetic humanistic astrologer in me says hold on. Someone’s got to call bull shit on all the maniacal exploitation of sentiment going on, not just in astrology, but everywhere. When we bring these two enormous entities together into a cosmic cobble, a synthesis emerges that suggests “The Lucky Break!” (Jupiter=Lucky; Uranus=Break). Typical of our so called attempt at synthesis in astrology, we limit ourselves to this notion of a “mash-up,” of symbol and sign. Sometimes by deploying another approach, like mixing east and west, or blending traditional and modern, thinking that we can arrive at a secret sauce of some sort, find an answer to the riddles that explain why something astrological technique “didn’t work” in the past. If it’s broke, try something new! But “mixing” isn’t really synthesis, and when we “mix” or “remix” we are expressing an extremely shallow and surface understanding of what synthesis means.

Don’t get me wrong, Uranus rules my third house and Jupiter is sitting there, 5 minutes just inside of the third house cusp at 00 Aquarius. Hello Jupiter-Saturn conjunction (12-21-2020)! HELLO! Pluto ingress (May 2023 to Oct 2025)! Jupiter is disposited by Uranus in my chart, and as previously mentioned this big ass conjunction is square my natal Uranus from the sixth house. Last year I signed up to run a half-marathon to celebrate a newfound vigor in my health after a small bout with cancer, but missed-a-step coming out of a Pizza joint and broke my knee. The accident happened on the same day I had signed up for the race. Yeh! Yeh! Yeh! I know!! Pizza injuries are the worst!!! This year I am back at it and hopefully can maintain my health and fitness to cross the finish line.

Uranus through the sixth house can be tricky – obviously. But generally speaking a renewed vigor in terms of health and diet is possible, as well as breakthroughs on the work front. Anytime we are considering Uranus we are talking about change. In my case sixth house matters beckon (sitting over here raising my hand like that over eager astrology student, “oooh oooh oooh!!! Uh huh! That’s me!! We just got a puppy AND now she is healing from surgery herself because we had her spayed. And yes! Puppies are a lot of hard work!”), and as this parenthetical example demonstrates, sometimes literally, but often the change is more in terms of inner changes regarding a change of habits and routine. Interestingly, the act of changing a habit starts in the mind, and the sixth house is ruled by Mercury on the natural wheel, which is square the third house, also ruled by Mercury on the natural wheel. Both the third and sixth houses are below the horizon, a subtle reference that there may be something more, something above the mind that must come into development. For natal and mundane matters, which is what most practitioners attend to, we cannot change without a corresponding shift in our mentality. But this brings us back to something I said above which is that most astrological analysis, while not necessarily wrong, is most definitely shallow – much of astrology like Gemini and Virgo on the natural wheel, operates below the horizon, within the perturbations of the lower mind. This simple observation has led me to the notion that we are not out charts, but much more than that, and we can make these changes of habit wherever Uranus is transiting, not only when it transits the 6th house.

I’ve been putting these posts off, while under the spell of Neptune which is presently saturating my Sun with what feels like 9 times the imaginational power of say Leonardo Da Vinci. No question about it, Neptune transits are intriguing, but you’ve really got to WATCH YOUR STEP! I learned not long ago that Robert Hand wrote Planets in Transit when Neptune crossed his Sun. I think the book was born out of lectures he was giving at the Esalen Institute back in the early 1970s. As Robert tells it, the meanings and significances of the planetary symbols were live streaming into his mind, he was in essence channeling interpretations and trying to move his fingers as fast as possible, just to keep up with the images that were running on the a cosmic reel through his mind. That is not a quote but a description of the conversation I heard based on my recollection [I believe it was on the Astrology Podcast] and an article I read, possibly on Robert Hand’s website, and what I intuitively suspect was going on. I can only hope my little book gets similar traction.

This BIG Jupiter-Uranus conjunction, which hits just after an epic Solar Eclipse conjunct Chiron, followed by the conjunction of Mars and Saturn, promises to heat up the cosmos more than a cell phone left on the dashboard of a car on a hot summer day, playing every Taylor Swift song ever written. But as BIG as we strive to go in astrology, as much as we seek answers from our charts by tracing aspects, transits and progressions, we invariably seem to fall short of the mark sometimes. Nothing works all the time! Even relationships!! Rarely do we get to bring our search in for a landing in some meaningful and sustaining way. The BIG transits come, and they go. But if they “miss” we try another approach. Use a different astrologer. Flip a few Tarot cards, or go off and study the Iching, or the enneagram, or anything else that might explain the Indeterminate. Sometimes an entirely new and better approach is invented out of whole cloth, or an anthropologist finds a codex buried in ancient sand, and through translation services unearths an old technique that promises to be the missing link. Knowing all of these possibilities is what makes my work so infuriatingly difficult for clients. Because I am constantly referencing back not to some arcane approach, but to the individual narrative as sacrosanct, using the chart only as a guide, not some book written long ago and taken as gospel. I left religion at the alter (see my last post). Maybe Taylor Swift, like REM, will write a song about that? My work encourages clients to do the work! Something magnificent happen when we do the work for ourselves and not give our power away to a planet, or for goodness sake to an astrologer. Doing so, it seems to me, is like making a deal with the devil. But there is more within us than meets the eye, we are much more than a “quiver in the dirt” among celestial giants. Imagine buckling up for the ride of your life and then out of nowhere screaming “FUUUUUCK IT!” at the top of your lungs. You pull the rip chord, and unclip the straps that hold you. You are free! Free from some random interpretation, codified by a lower mentality, and ascending upwards to a higher power.

“And if we can go back into ourselves and identify ourselves, not with our superficial experience, but with the hot radiant penumbra of the Divine, we can live in that attitude towards the contacts of the world and, standing back in our entire consciousness from the pleasures and pains of the body, vital being and mind, possess them as experiences whose nature being superficial does not touch or impose itself on our core and real being. In the entirely expressive Sanskrit terms, there is an – anandamaya behind the manomaya, a vast Bliss-Self behind the limited mental self, and the latter is only a shadowy image and disturbed reflection of the former. The truth of ourselves lies within and not on the surface.” The Life Divine p. 113

My words are not meant to discourage readers from booking a session. I have pretty good street cred as far as “prediction work” and what one transit might possibly “mean” versus another, but my contention here and now with the BIG EVENT upon us, is that these predictions and projections we make as astrologers are the small fish on the surface, with much bigger fish to fry if we delve deeper, if we reach into the unknown depths within ourselves. That’s what I am excited about! Discovering healing narratives in the stories of the people I help. That is to help you transcend the notion that you are governed by the very narrow view of what astrology, or some astrologer has to say about you based on your chart. You are not your chart! There’s that, and I suppose I’m also excited about these revelations that have been pouring in like some live stream into my life, like a preview of a feature film during this recent transit of Neptune.

HVA