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Uranus in Pisces: More Wonderful Nonsense? Dear Friend and Client: Lots of us have wondered for decades "what it would take to wake people up." Apparently the answer is George W. Bush. But more help is on the way. The real fireworks of 2003 and, as it turns out, the next seven years, have not even begun. They actually begin Monday, when Uranus takes its first adventure into Pisces since before the Great Depression, World War II and the nuclear age. The last time this particular event happened was April Fool's Day of 1919, beginning an astrological era that spanned most of the next decade, through January 1928. World War I had ended the previous year. Searching Google, the only historical references I could find for April 1, 1919, were things like the City of Seattle taking over its street car system from the local power company, a fire station in Aurora, IL being closed down in an effort to economize, and the founding of the Rotary Club chapter in Trinidad, Colorado. It was just your average day in the history of the universe. Many astrologers and fans are speculating what will happen now that Uranus is changing signs for the first time since it entered Aquarius in the mid-1990s. If you know Uranus, you know this planet never lets you down. The now-ending Uranian-Aquarian era came in with computers plugging into the wall and went out with them plugging into network routers and cable modems: the Internet appeared as a consumer product like a mushroom. The 'net has the distinction of being the first two-way medium besides short wave radio. And it appeared suddenly and took over in a few years, seemingly out of nowhere. Toward the end of the prior Uranian era, when the planet of disruption and innovation was crashing through Capricorn -- the sign of structure, government and the past -- the Iron Curtain, the Berlin Wall and the USSR all wound up in souvenir shops. This is one serious planet. (Admittedly, Uranus had a little help from Neptune in that rather impressive rearrangement of world empires.) So we well might wonder: what exactly happens next? It's unlikely that any living astrologer remembers what it felt like to actually experience Uranus in Pisces, though a few may still be around who have this placement in their natal charts. A lot has changed since 1919. Sneakers now come with flashing red lights, but a dog is still a dog. Still, a look at the history of the 1920s may help us taste the energy of that era. We don't always think of the 1920s as being an especially compelling time in history. The Great Depression and Hiroshima and Cold War that followed warp our view of spacetime and make it seem like a quaint moment, when flappers -- those stylish, brash, hedonistic young woman with short skirts and shorter hair -- thumbed their noses at society's conventions, when gangsters ruled Chicago, and when jazz led directly to sex. They tell me a lot of marijuana was smoked. America was rising in an economic boom. More disposable income was available for the average working person. But there is a lot more to the picture. Within what now feels like hours of the first Pisces ingress, women get the right to vote, prohibition was enacted, there was a shocking Red Scare, and Republican Warren G. Harding won the presidential election of 1920 in a landslide. Harding, unlike his predecessor Woodrow Wilson, was a firm believer in isolationism. Congress refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles and America opted out of the League of Nations that Wilson had been instrumental in setting up. Legislation was passed to control the unions and prevent strikes, the courts tended to support employers over employees, taxes for the rich were slashed. This was the era in which business first took the lead from government as the chief instrument of society. In 1919, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were charged with a murder they had not committed, in one of many frantic moments of the United States becoming terrified of outsiders. A bomb had exploded in front of the attorney general's home; he responded with raids and secret detentions of foreign nationals. Their trial stretched on for seven years, and was known around the world. The two were executed by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in August 1927. "If it had not been for these things," Sacco said just before his death, "I might live out my life talking at street corners to scorning men. I might have died, unmourned, unknown, a failure. Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life could we have to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man's understanding of man as now we do by accident." Through the '20s, there was the rise and heyday of the KKK, the Ku Klux Klan, a secret order that's now associated with anti-black racism in the south. In those days, their main targets were Catholics. They pretty much ran the state of Indiana. There are still secret clusters of them all over the place. Howard Carter, on Nov. 4, 1922, pried open King Tut's tomb, unleashing a weird spate of deaths among the archeologists involved in the expedition, and unleashing a rage of Egyptomania, in which Egyptian motifs became fashionable in clothing and decorating. This was the era of Aleister Crowley, Edmund Arthur Waite and the Golden Dawn. There was an early version of the New Age movement raging in the pseudo-intellectual upper crust. Theosophical writer Alice A. Bailey publishes The Consciousness of the Atom in 1922. In 1925, Dr. Mark Edmund Jones and a clairvoyant named Elsie Wheeler record the Sabian Symbols, now one of the most famous symbolic references in all of modern astrology. The practice of something called Spiritualism was at its peak, with things going bump in the night and tables levitating. At the other end of the spectrum, psychoanalysis was becoming entrenched as a dominant framework among the educated for understanding the supposed inner nature of the mind. There was another famous clash between rationalism and seeming mysticism: the perfectly outrageous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, in which a Tennessee school teacher was charged with violating a law against offering students "any theory that denies the story of divine creation as taught by the Bible and to teach instead that man was descended from a lower order of animals." A few years later, Charles Lindburgh got in his airplane and flew across the Atlantic, one of many aviation adventures and misadventures of that era. Radio was fast becoming something: for the first time, households were connected by a live, instantaneous broadcast medium, which brought us a long way from when news of the Lincoln assassination took two weeks to reach some parts of the country. RCA created NBC, with its Red and Blue networks. Blue was eventually spun off as ABC, the first spinnoff in media history. There were phonograph records, too. People had the sense that they were living in an important time in history. In science, Niels Bohr. Albert Einstein, Satuendra Nath Mose and others were penetrating the layers of physical and energetic reality, slugging out the nature of light and energy and smashing atoms on paper. In 1920, Einstein publishes the General Theory of Relativity. "The gravitational field has only a relative existence," Einstein commented, "Because for an observer freely falling from the roof of a house -- at least in his immediate surroundings -- there exists no gravitational field." Divergences between the theories of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics were being explored at a rather feverish pace. In 1921, Einstein won the Nobel Prize for physics for his work with the photoelectric effect, which would lead to television; by the end of the decade, the first television broadcast would occur -- a quiz show, of all things. In this era, the neutron is discovered and the notion of causality, a foundation of traditional physics, is losing its grip on reality. The implications of this are still sinking in 80 years later. In literature, there was the Lost Generation of writers, including Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Parker and the woman who named them, Gertrude Stein. But the writing of this era seems to have begun with what turned out to be among the most prophetic lines in modern literature, from The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot, published in 1922: What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man. You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water. Only There is shadow under this red rock, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust. Film made extremely impressive advances, and the decade was crowned by the 1926 release of Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang. This was the first full-length science fiction film, 90 minutes of silent dystopia. The film is set in a world where a rich elite thrive in an above ground city, and where masses of drones work below the Earth to keep the city in working order. Residents of the underground city are bound to and ruled by their machines. We don't have to look far to see the Piscean themes wherein the revolutionary energy of Uranus is at work in the mystical and philosophical realms -- expressing itself in part as science, in part as ideological debate, and in part as social regression or progress. The nature of reality is itself at stake; questions of faith are at the forefront; technology is advancing in shocking ways that both penetrate the mysteries of physical existence and bring the world much closer together; and the most prominent writers of that era are questioning the meaning of what they are seeing and feeling. If we look at the few Uranian eras described in this article – the Pisces era of the 1920s, which saw major advances in transportation, broadcasting, physics, women’s rights and spiritual issues; the Capricorn era of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the time in which Communism fell; and the Aquarius era of the mid1990s to early 2000s, in which the Internet was created, we can glimpse a pattern that astrologers have long acknowledged. Given that Pisces is one of the most visionary signs, and Uranus is the planet of invention, it would be a really good idea to envision what we want for ourselves and for our communities as this energy approaches -- not predict what's going to happen. -- Additional research: Chelsea Bottinelli, Sean Springer, Erika Hawkins, Pam Purdy and Jeanne Treadway Current Astrological Highlights Please see the daily edition: http://www.ericfrancis.com/daily.html Webcasting Comes to Planet Waves, or Vice Versa Every Wednesday at 8:45 a.m. PST or 11:45 a.m. EST, I do a live webcast at http://www.voiceofvashon.org/ hosted by Susan McCabe. Please spread the word. Planet Waves by Eric Francis http://www.PlanetWaves.net/ Mid-Pisces Birthdays My own birthday is this week, so as you might guess I'm having a little crisis of objectivity. As I write, Uranus is at 29 degrees and 52 minutes of Aquarius -- just 8 arc minutes from the Pisces angle. I often feel like I'm trying to see around a series of corners looking into mirrors, never actually getting a clear view of the future. But there are times when vision deceives and senses six, seven and eight must be enacted. And those senses tell me that you (that is, we) as an individual are entering a time in your personal history during which you will find you have a lot more in common with people than you do isolating you from them. In this equation, you are not the only one changing; the world is in fact changing, and changing fast and, in fact, right now, in ways that most people would never have anticipated. Millions of people are embarking on a journey that you've already been on for the past seven or so years. You may be at different stages of growth than the people around you, but if you pay attention you are likely to notice that you and your peers really are heading in the same direction, and that's all that matters. As a result, your life will be a lot easier, and your challenges a lot more rewarding. In the weekly, I surprised myself a few moments ago by pointing out the "artificially sweetened mix of rationalism and fantasy" that we are force-fed from long before the first time we see a television set (Venus conjunct Neptune in Aquarius, if you're curious). I want to caution us about that, because these themes are strong in your solar return chart this year. Both fantasy and rationalism are substitutes for real people, real places and real feelings. The other side of this is that you are carrying a vision or message -- the next step of the process that I've described above -- that you have, for whatever reason, a high likelihood of bringing to many people, or, alternately, the people closest to you. Take these opportunities and ideas for what they are, no more, no less. Define success as happiness and the freedom to live your particular way, and you cannot fail. Aries (March 20-April 19) Humanity tends to respond to the unknown with fear. Any void of information tends to be filled with negative potential. If it turns out that expectation and visualization are some, most or all of what drives humanity, then we do need to reassess this particular habit of thought and emotion. And we won't do that until we get a real sense of what's driving it, what the shadow lurking at the core of the unknown might be. You are entering a long phase of life when the mysteries both within your own heart and the Greater Metropolitan Cosmos need to be among your best friends. Each of them, and every one of them. That is easier written than achieved. But you do have time, and you will surely have opportunity, starting soon. Taurus (April 19-May 20) If you want to know how difficult it is to change one's way of thinking, just look at how many people are the spitting images of their parents: thinking like their parents, feeling like their parents, and making decisions based on the values of their parents. We might say this is pathetic, but we might also ask why it's so. I'll propose the answer. We become like people when we believe the same lies they do. The worst lies are the ones we don't know about, but of course we do usually know, and for sure, you know. You will soon discover that you have the power to be as different as you'll allow yourself to be, in thought, in action, and in what you decide is true. Gemini (May 20-June 21) You are about to experience a long-term transit that is, at once, among the most brilliant in the astrological database, and the one that few people are actually able to use. Whoever wrote, "Many are called, but few choose to respond" must have been thinking of Uranus through the 10th house, the astrological region of career, reputation and achievement. With Pisces as the sign located on your 10th solar house, it's not like you ever have a perfectly clear picture of your professional calling. But it must meet certain minimal requirements. At this point in your life, however, there will be no fooling yourself about whether those requirements are actually being met. Cancer (June 21-July 22) My sense is that you're about to enter a long-term love affair with the power of faith. I recognize that on this planet one can make a lot of arguments against such a thing, but only the faithless would dare. And while my sense is that you've had ever-less use for them in your life, this would be a good time to declare the faithless useless teachers, except as negative examples. Don't count on converting anyone; learning from them is more than adequate. But they don't matter now: your own choices do, and they are about to take you much further than you've ever known, both in thought and in geographic range. Ultimately freedom is an act of faith. It is not a government grant or a privilege bestowed. Leo (July 22-Aug 23) You have probably endured what's seemed like an endless spell of relationship challenges, ranging from unexpected changes, to shocks, to disruptions, to meetings with people you needed desperately to love but who you just were not ready for. But your experiences of these people have made you ready. If, at this point, your relationship life is stable and strong, you can be sure that you've taken this opportunity to become a strong, self-reliant individual. But if not -- if you're alone or still reeling from the thunder, don't count yourself a failure. You have learned more than you think. And the theme of life and love is about to switch to something a lot more soothing, liberating and inspiring. Just give it a little time. Virgo (Aug. 23-Sep. 22) Of all the signs, Virgo has the tendency to look at people and at the world and see someone or something greater than itself. For a long time I was inclined to think this was due to a kind of astrologically-based cultural conditioning; many people who don't know astrology are given to using its less helpful stereotypes. But I'm inclined to think it's a combination of actual humility set within a world where all we see is glamour and pretense. You're learning to let yourself be sexier, and at the same time, figuring out that if anyone is going to be fair in relationships, it's you. But you have a lot to learn about being spontaneous and free, and about opening your heart and letting others be the same -- and help is on the way. Libra (Sep. 22-Oct. 23) Your work life can no longer bear any resemblance to a prison. You are becoming too smart, too creative and way too saucy for that to last for much longer. How long will you survive? A day? A week? A year? Maybe. How have you survived? By being a head-case: one who has taken all the strangeness and oddity and brilliance of who you are and confined it to your mind. You've become a kind of futurist, actually, envisioning all kinds of daring changes in the world and in your world. The only thing that's stopped you from taking action is an odd power you've had to distance yourself emotionally from what you know is true. This has not been a free show; it's more like Pay-Per-View. Once you feel, you will decide. Scorpio (Oct. 23-Nov. 22) As usual, it's your job to help resolve or play a role in healing a collective psychological struggle of some kind. One of the reasons you can do this is because you are, in the first place, able to see what is collective emotional property as such, and not give into the temptation to blame any one individual -- most particularly yourself. For the foreseeable future, one of the most important messages of your life is that we are all in this together. But what of you, the aspect of yourself that remains on the 'private life' side of your personal boundary? To the extent that you've exchanged artistic expression for emotional drama in recent years is the degree to which you will need to claim back your life. It will probably be easier than you think, though you'll have to stage a revolution or two. Sagittarius (Nov. 22 - Dec. 22) The changes that are unfolding in your family life have been in progress for quite some time, and you know the name of the game is freedom. It's both the freedom to be an individual, and the freedom to define your security in a way that is meaningful, safe, and allows you to make decisions. Something cannot really be called safe if it wedges the steering wheel and brake pedal of life, that is, your power to choose. And choice insinuates the presence of more people in your life as intimates than are currently sanctioned by the Republican party. It may seem that you are always the visionary, and always working the far edge of what everyone around you thinks of as reality. That would be true. Capricorn (Dec. 22-Jan. 20) For all its reputation for adhering to tradition and organization, scratch a Capricorn and you will find an iconoclast and system-buster under their surface. From this point you need to let your imagination, not past precedent, lead the way. On some level you may have lived with a tremendous reluctance to let the world in on the deep changes in your values system that have dominated your life almost as far back as you can remember. But now you have no choice but to begin expressing the ideas that are, by their truth, going to change how you relate to the world. The word, or is it something much larger and less tangible? Look at it this way. The definitions of life that most people around you depend on have never meant less to you. And this truth will benefit everyone. Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb. 19) Whatever you've been through in these recent weeks, and I can't imagine it's been especially easy or comfortable. Nobody likes to be forced to change, or to make a decision, and in truth you can't be compelled to make a commitment that you don't really feel; it won't be a commitment at all. But if you look, you are likely to see that recent events have been part of a much greater plan to which you've been deeply committed for quite a long time. And, my sense is that all that's really changed is your awareness. There is no way you could have continued living under the kind of mental stress that your life had become dominated by, and events have conspired to take you one whole step away from there. One step away: but toward what, you soon shall see. Pisces (Feb. 19-March 20) What to do, what to do. Just keep feeling, how about? Enlightenment, freedom, spiritual clarity and creative strength have been described many ways, but we often forget the simplest of them: when in doubt, just simply love. That is freedom. I am certain that, if you could somehow connect a remote sensor to everyone's mind, you will see that this is THE issue. We wind up ensnared in 'ties that bind' and those bindings translate to little more or less than the restriction on feeling love. I recognize that there are many reasons to mistrust feeling, not the least of which is that we are fed an artificially sweetened mix of rationalism and fantasy from our first sentient moments. But you will soon be craving your freedom like never before, remember. How do newspaper horoscopes work? Planet Waves Weekly and PlanetWaves.net are edited by Eric Francis, with help from Chelsea Bottinelli and the Vision List. This newsletter is $49.95 per year and published 52 times per year plus the monthly horoscope. 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