Eric Francis in the Chironian, abandoned natural cement mine. Photo by Danielle Voirin.

THE SUN IS now in Sagittarius, and has made a square to the lunar nodes commemorated by Saturday's Full Moon in Gemini. Sagittarius is the sign of the Centaur, Chiron. Many astrologers associate Chiron with Virgo, which is true enough. However, one cannot help but notice the huge Centaur standing at the gates of Sagittarius -- the gates to the Galactic Core. I commemorated the event with a fire down in the Chironian on Saturday night, an abandoned cement mine in Rosendale where I have learned a lot of astrology.

The Sun's journey through Sagittarius is usually a wild ride. In the Northern Hemisphere, we have the combination of Morning Light Savings Time (i.e., the end of daylight time), the days growing shorter and the cloud cover coming in, which, combined, create the effect of it feeling like midnight at 5 pm. The holidays are approaching and there is plenty of year-end business to attend to, especially if you're an accountant or an astrologer.

But the real excitement, I think, is the result of the Sun aligning with the Great Attractor and the Galactic Core on the approach to solstice. My feeling after years of observation is that the acceleration effect into New Year's Eve is the direct result of the Sun's alignment with these two massive points. It feels like you can live a week in an hour or a month in a day. Think of it: gravity bends space and time. At the core of the galaxy, we have a cluster of perhaps a hundred billion stars, concentrated in one place. The Sun and the Earth align exactly with this and get caught in the time warp.

This is a time to practice that Zen-on-crank approach to life for which Sagittarius is so internationally famous.

While the Sun makes this pass through the 9th sign, the cosmos is gearing up for a lot of Capricorn. Numerous planets cross the first degree of Capricorn in the coming weeks, with the assistance of Mars in Cancer crossing the first degree of Cancer. These accentuate something called the Aries Point. Not to be too confusing, the term Aries Point pertains to the first degree of Aries -- one of the big hot spots in the sky -- and also to any degree which makes a square or opposition to that point.

Summing up what I will present in a more detailed format Friday, as we begin to go through our Sagittarian wild ride, the world gets ready to go through some shall we say interesting changes. Capricorn is the sign of structure. So many planets -- particularly Pluto -- in Capricorn indicated restructuring; destructuring; and building on the visions we have conceived during the journey of Pluto in Sagittarius (which began in the mid-1990s).

I will leave it at that for now.

On a business note, in response to a couple of subscriber inquiries about Small World Stories. It is true that for the past nine years, the annual horoscope has been free to subscribers, and now we are charging for it. It has become a big production number, with the extended-length sign horoscopes, additional articles, photos and art, and astrology resources.

My portion of this project typically comes to about 30,000 words plus editing and some art directing; plus I am assisted by about 10 other writers, astrologers and artists. Therefore we are charging $19.95 for the whole package -- a cosmic bargain. This will increase as the publication date approaches. The fee currently covers all 12 signs, plus many excellent extras. Note that by publication time, the signs will be sold separately for about the price you can get ONE sign for now.

Chironian illuminated by fire light, with the bright Full Moon sky outside. Photo by Danielle Voirin.

We are taking phone orders if you don't like to order by Internet. I've set up a New York number to divert some traffic from Mama Chelsea's office. The number is (845) 338-2011. Please aim for Eastern business hours. If you leave a message, please speak slowly and clearly, and leave a callback number. We will get back to you ASAP.

Speaking of Sagittarius cum Capricorn, proceeds from Small World Stories are going to fund the next stage of our business plan (which a Sagittarius mentor prodded me to formalize). The next part of this plan you'll see is a book called Mars Calling -- a bestseller about the astrology of men by me and Paloma Todd. So click while the clicking is good, get in early on Small World Stories, and we'll be rolling the proceeds into our next project.

Here is the credits page for last year's annual -- The Spiral Door. At the bottom of the credits page is the directory of all past annual editions. They are fun to click through for a little tour of astrological history and our development as a Web project.

Catch you Friday!

Yours & truly,

Aries (March 20-April 19)
Usually we humans don't look back. At least here in the Western world, particularly in the United States, we have a disdain of history and we disregard the past. As an Aries, you are born under one of the most forward-thinking signs, but the long Mars retrograde that began in your sign last month is taking you on a deep review of the past: how you felt in the past, what influenced you, and most of all, what has contributed to your sense of unease or vulnerability. You may feel like you don't want to go some of the places that Mars is taking you. You may be inclined to think that the past is over and therefore you don't want any part of it. But how we feel about the past is what limits us in the present. Take these opportunities to resolve what has been left unresolved for so long. Be mindful of the depth of your feelings, including your frustration and most of all, your desire to express yourself. What is the emotional knot that holds you back? Now is the time to untangle it.
 
Taurus (April 19-May 20)
With all that you've been through this year, I would imagine that you want to get your affairs settled and know what way your life is going. But this is not the time to settle down; it is the time to refine your long-range vision, and to begin actively experimenting with it. It is true that you take a highly structured view of the future, but this is in most ways an artifice based on the past. You cannot really arrange the future; you can only live it. You cannot really organize the present, but you can seek to understand where you are, and what options you have available. But it would be prudent to come up with a new way of thinking of things besides, "In three years I will do that, and in five years I will do that." All the conceptual structures of time that quite literally block your view of the future are about to come tumbling down. You are being called far and wide, but you will never see the possibilities if you are looking from a low place, or if you are hiding from yourself, or the world.
 
Gemini (May 20-June 21)
Because you are inclined to go through fast changes, you may not always agree with the wisdom of structuring your affairs in life, of setting specific limits and using them as a source of profit. Or, you may find that you overcompensate using structure, and cannot exercise the flexibility that you need. While you depend on it, you are more inclined to view structure as something limiting your gains or preventing you from doing what you want. But those days are waning fast. You are entering an extended phase of your life when you must use time and space as allies; when you must become the architect of your relationships. You need to use what you have learned about people seeming to have so much power over you or impact in your life, and arrange your personal contracts so that they work with those influences consciously. You cannot use control against control, but you can use awareness as a means of increasing what you know about the places where you meet with others and exchange energy. That energy may be sexual, it may involve money, and it will certainly involve the effects of the choices you have made in the past -- a past that becomes less relevant with every passing hour.
 
Cancer (June 21-July 22)
You've always placed a high value on durable relationships, but you are about to discover why that is so. For as much as you want and need love and companionship, the world has a way of making sure you wait for them, and that you take it slowly when they are available; and in recent years, the delays have seemed unbearable. Yet you do not need to confuse delays with denial. Even in our world where time can do so much damage, eventually time becomes our most significant tool. In physical reality, time is really all we have. Therefore, the only sane or practical way to use time is as a resource. That being said, it is the present and not the future that has an extraordinarily compelling property. Please do not shrink from the moment: rise to it, meet it consciously, meet it boldly. If you discover a reason to doubt yourself, consider at least two reasons that you have to be self-assured. In the coming weeks, people are likely to be taking a lot higher view of you than you usually have of yourself. Go past believing anything anyone says; make sure you match their vision of you with a vision of your own.
 
Leo (July 22-Aug. 23)
Your work and your health -- these are the themes that will guide your life for the next decade. For many recent years, you have navigated your way through what was once the blind spot of your relationships. You have learned to see, or at least learned Braille. You have learned to feel, or at least learned the difference between pleasure and pain. But as planets move into your 6th solar house, you will take all that you have learned and put it to work in the most practical ways. In much the same way that your relationships have become a forum for healing, your work will become a proving ground for your most advanced sense of who you are. You have formulated a vision of what you want, and you've come a long way toward making that vision real. The next step is about fully integrating yourself, your daily work process, your creativity and your intimate partnerships in your life mission, however you define that mission -- and changes in that definition are imminent. How this relates to health is that everything you do, and every choice you make, must support you spiritually, emotionally and biologically.
 
Virgo (Aug. 23-Sep. 22)
So much of your energy in recent years has been invested in creating a safe and dependable security base. Yet at least you believe that such is possible. In that time you have come to depend on something deeper than yourself to provide that security. You have put your roots deep into the ground, deep into the world, and solidly into the soul of the world. As a Virgo, you are blessed with an organic spirituality that is one with your most practical worldview. You are now being called upon to go beyond both of these things, and begin to express yourself in ways that push past the limits of your hang-ups. You are destined to care less what people think of you; less about how your parents might respond if they knew the real contents of your mind; and less indeed about what your children would think, if you have any. Caring about these things has only served to block your creative process, your sexual independence and your drive to be free and celebrate your life. Forget about being safe for a while. That is a ruse. All that counts now is whether you enjoy your life, and that is a worthy goal.
 
Libra (Sep. 22-Oct. 23)
As a Venus-ruled sign, you're supposed to be someone whose main activity in life is feathering your nest. But for the longest time, your goal in life seems to have involved clearing your mind. This is a more ambitious task than creating any form of worldly security or comfort, and a more valuable one. Everything we experience in this world follows from our thought patterns, whether it's because those patterns create the world, or because they inform us about how to respond to it. You may be anticipating some kind of threat to your security base, but that is a thought. It is true that your security base will, in fact, be changing, but how it changes is a matter of the thoughts in your mind. Are you in the active role in these processes, or the passive one? As a Libran, you would naturally be a leader. As a human, you would more likely be in the role of follower. Which is it going to be? Once you recognize how deep is your need to free your mind and nourish your soul, I trust you will decide that you simply must be a leader.
 
Scorpio (Oct. 23-Nov. 22)
You must consider your long-range plans carefully, not quickly. There is a difference. In truth, you are standing in the midst of your vision. Yet that vision may seem to be going sidewards, backwards and awkwards -- any way but forwards. That is not entirely true; the universe is making progress that you cannot see. Yet you would feel better if you consciously recognized that you are part of the landscape you wish to enter. What is the apparent delay? It involves an old commitment you are rethinking. This agreement seems to have gone too far in one particular direction; something designed to support your security is actually doing its part to undermine it. It was like you signed two contracts at once, not realizing there was carbon paper involved. Over the next couple of months, you need to revisit all currently standing agreements that bind you to another person, and consider them in their entirety. Every contract involves an exchange; slavery was outlawed with the 13th Amendment. You must strive to understand exactly what the exchange entails.
 
Sagittarius (Nov. 22-Dec. 22)
Everything is changing, and it's changing fast. But as I have said over many months, it is you who is changing and the 'things' and circumstances in your life are following suit. After all, you are the one 'thing' that they all have in common. And you have come to possess the golden thread that weaves together all the stories of the world; all spiritual traditions; all of the sources of those traditions. And you want nothing, if not to make them real in your life. You have access to what Alan Watts called the supreme identity -- self-awareness that goes beyond our idea of what identity is supposed to be, beyond this clunky, defensive and mostly useless thing called the ego. To access this, you merely need to be aware, and to drop any semblance of denial of what you know to be true. Feel your deeper understanding percolating through. This will come in many forms, but one of them is the sense of connection to something much larger than yourself. Please don't spend your time trying to prove or disprove this; you are not a skeptic, you are a mystic, and that is the path of faith; and of experience.

Sagittarius birthday report will be published Monday, Dec. 3. For the 2007 Sagittarius annual horoscope, check this link.
 
Capricorn (Dec. 22-Jan. 20)
You may have no idea at all what is in store, but you may feel like you're on the verge of something big. You also may be noticing that your fear level is increasing, but that the fear contains a ray of light that is far more potent than any sense of loss or lack you may be living with. I suggest you not waste your time with anticipation, but rather, take a good look at your life right now and ask yourself what you would keep, what you would change, and what you would create if you wanted to. In truth, it will be only a short time before you get to create anything you want. Indeed, the power of change and the corresponding power of creation are the two most meaningful gifts you now possess. Promise and progress will take turns being the dominant factor. The power to envision something better and dismantle something old are both necessary ingredients of the developments that are coming, and you will need to develop extreme precision with both of them. I bid that you take nothing for granted now, including what you have previously deemed impossible.
 
Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb. 19)
In order to do anything well, you must surrender to it. You have learned this; you may have forgotten it. Presently, you are seeing the benefits of years of past effort, establishing yourself, expanding your vision, and slowly melting away the structure that keeps your mind fixed -- as in 'fixed sign' in the language of astrology. Over a long series of years, dating back to around when Monica Lewinsky was big news, you slowly began to let go of patterns that were not supportive of your growth, gradually eroding them with a softer substance than ideology. Then you began a new phase, of seeing your own flaws and attempting to repair them scrupulously. This may have left you feeling more broken than fixed, but at least you have done one thing that has been long and hard in coming -- you have trained your self-awareness. In the next phase of your life, you are likely to begin demolishing the containers that hold you in place; the traditions that do nothing other than bog down your ability to love; the hidden structures that feel like wearing a corset under a sleek, sexy bathing suit.
 
Pisces (Feb. 19-March 20)
"Man who wakes up famous has not been sleeping." This was my favorite fortune cookie ever, and I Scotch-taped it to my first soft-cover copy of A Course in Miracles. But what always stunned me a little was when people would read it and have no clue what it meant. Now, for someone born under a sign ruled by Neptune, you have been doing a most amazing job of staying awake. You have spent this decade-plus of Pluto in Sagittarius slowly building a vision, and you are likely to have succeeded -- in Pluto style -- in ways that you simply cannot have foreseen and cannot see now. Yet the forthcoming conjunction of Jupiter, Pluto and the Galactic Core is going to light up the world from inside, and reveal many things you have not been able to perceive. But it will do something else, which is reveal your connection to ideas, to people and to places that seem remote, greater than yourself, and vastly meaningful in contrast to what the world holds as so important. In sum, you have developed a solution to a problem you did not know existed. But that is fine -- if you knew, you might have never tried.


CREDITS: Associate Editor: Priya Kale. Webmaster: Anatoly Ryzhenko. Proofreader and Fact Checker: Sara Churchville. Horoscope Editor: Jessica Keet. Associate Photo Editor: Sharon Bellenger. Business Manager: Chelsea Bottinelli. Published by Planet Waves, Inc., a Washington State corporation, all rights reserved.

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