Hudson Valley Astrologer

At the very beginning of the year a radio program aired a dire warning. It was a short segment on my local public radio station that announced the world had moved to less that 2-Minutes before Midnight on the famous Doomsday Clock. It sounded perilous. And it is perilous. But all that was before COVID. Before the lockdowns. Before super-spreader events and new strains of sars-cov-2.

And here we are at the end of the year already and the long awaited Jupiter-Saturn conjunction. In an earlier post I referenced “runs” on grocery stores, plagues and no small amount of prescience but a whole lot of irony perhaps. I also urged that we not being lulled into fear by the cognitive biases we all harbor, to not fear an astrological construct just because of some ominous measurement and the lore attached to it. That we might trust the technocracy over superstition for once. I mean science has come so far. We know so much more than what we knew 800 years ago. And while we haven’t approached anywhere near the percentage of deaths that occurred during the Middle Ages when 30% of the worlds population vanished from the black plague, we have already lost, and still stand to lose many more people than we had to lose. Turns out our fear of science overwhelmed our primitive Labrador brains, causing people to suffer and die. My argument back then was that society is so much more rational today than it was in then, in Mediaeval Europe. We aren’t nearly as superstitious by half. And yet movements from Q-Anon, to Stop the Steal and anti-everything have mushroomed. I suppose the biggest irony among the “faithful” is that a fair proportion of these folks also DO NOT BELIEVE in astrology.

So, it isn’t necessarily the virus that has been the most deadliest threat in 800 years to come our way, but our belief systems that have run amok. Ignorance during the Black Plague is excused by historians because the people at the time literally did not know any better. Today, we can’t be so sure. Some of the very people in power knew full well how deadly the virus would be and still failed to act in a rational way. Decision makers were assessing other risks not related to the pandemic, avoiding other threats that affected only themselves and a small segment of society.

The Bob Woodward interview revealed an articulate and informed Trump who against his better judgment thought there was an advantage in denying the pandemic. And in a series of bungling performances he doubled down making matters worse. Each death an excessive and unnecessary death on our way to 300,000 lost souls. And ultimately a raging crisis that would prove Trump’s undoing. He gambled on a strategy that turned into the deadliest crisis in America’s history.

As dangerous and horrific as the virus is, seemingly like a slow motion nuclear bomb, the fallout is not as devastating as all that, not like a nuclear explosion. The Doomsday Clock on the other hand does in fact refer to a nuclear disaster. And thanks to Covid the instability of the world is now worse than it was at the start of the year. So, this Jupiter-Saturn conjunction mutating to Air Signs for the first time in 800 years better start bringing in some welcomed changes as we leave the heaviness of Earth Signs and Capricorn. I know my own cavalier attitude about Aversion Bias at the beginning of the year was certainly misplaced. The tragedy of the pandemic for the most part could have been averted. But the decisions made by authorities (Trump) was to avoid losing an election they (he) thought might be winnable if the economy wasn’t plunged into a recession caused by economic shutdowns to stop the virus. We had plenty to fear. More than recession. More than “socialism.” Radical polarization and conspiracies were spreading faster than the virus. We should have been more afraid not less. And then this conjunction hit my chart in a way I didn’t see coming. Sure I thought of the possibilities BUT those things happen to other people. Not me! Right? Sometimes astrology is miraculously prescient in ways that can confound us. Especially when we know better. And denying those potentials regardless, making decisions by avoidance or ignoring the possibility of the very thing we feared, ends up making matters much worse. The aversion bias of avoiding risk aversion, to the point of being reckless.

2021 cannot get here fast enough!