A fun spin on serious cosmic stuff! Wendell C. Perry has 40 years experience studying astrology and how it impacts personalities & relationships. He's written two books & published articles in astrology magazines. He's happy to share this website so that you, too, can have fun with astrology to help you in everyday life!
Astrologers can be a gloomy a lot. Gather a bunch of them around a mundane chart (a horoscope for a future event) and you’re almost always going to hear more negative predictions than positive. Those predictions can range from “You better watch out.” to “Run for the hills!” but the general message is that there are more “bad” aspects than “good” ones and even the “good” ones can’t be always trusted.
I was thinking of this when I decided to take a peak at the chart for the U.S. presidential election on Nov. 5, 2024. This election is already shaping up to be a wild affair, with one of the major contenders facing several criminal indictments and the other’s son under investigation by a federal prosecutor. So it’s not surprising that when I looked at the chart my eyes immediately landed on something ominous. (Clickhere here to see that horoscope.) That ominous aspect is the opposition of Mars (at 0 degrees of Leo) to Pluto (at 29 degrees of Capricorn).
The Full Moon chart for Aug. 1 had the Sun in the Ninth House (click here to see the article and the chart) which signaled that courts would play an important role in the events of that lunation. That’s precisely what happened. We got two more indictments for Donald Trump and a special prosecutor being appointed in the Hunter Biden case. I also said that Jupiter’s square to the Sun and Moon might have a benevolent effect. That’s what Republicans in Congress are alledging with their criticism of man chosen to be the special prosecutor.
I was wrong about the writers and actors strike. Though negotiation are ongoing, there was no movement in the matter. Instead, the placement of Venus on the Midheaven of that Full Moon chart drew our attention to Hawaii, America’s island paradise, and the fires that devastated Maui. Of course, this was also validation of what I wrote about the long square to the Nodes of the Moon by Pluto and its karmic link to climate change.
The New Moon chart for Aug. 16 is quite different from the previous lunation. (Click on New Moon to see the chart.) The Sun and the Moon are in the First House, marking this as a particularly significant lunation, where they are conjunct Venus. They also form an almost exact square with Uranus in the Tenth House, an indicator of sudden and radical change.
In my forecast for Aug. 6, 2023 I predicted we would be in a celebratory mood on that day. That prediction was based on the transiting square between the Sun and Jupiter and it may have worked for many people across the nation. (It certainly did for me.) But for a certain group of people on the docks in Montgomery, Alabama it was somewhat less than accurate.
I’m talking about the brawl that occurred in that city between white boaters and a group of African Americans on an excursion boat. Videos of this event are currently burning up the internet and it will no doubt become fodder for political pundits on both sides in the coming days. On the surface this was simply an example of a group of people, mostly young men, getting caught up in a violent moment, but at a deeper level it was a fateful collision between white privilege and black rage.
For the folks involved in this altercation (particularly the several who were arrested) my forecast for Aug. 6 might have seemed overly optimistic. (I do try to emphasize the positive in these daily forecast.) In reality, however, what happened in Montgomery was a perfect expression of the dark side of Jupiter’s influence. Jupiter expands everything, including our sense of righteousness. Combatants on both sides of that confrontation no doubt felt that their anger and violence was somehow righteous and that kind of Jupiterian righteousness almost always ends with innocent people getting hurt.
However, there was another astrological factor at work in this event. As I pointed out in my last “Following the Moon” article, we are in the midst of a long tern square by Pluto to the Nodes of the Moon. On Aug. 6 that aspect was within three minutes of the arc of being exact. In a chart done for Montgomery, Alabama for 6:45 PM (fifteen minutes before police were called) Pluto is exactly on the Ascendant. (Click here to see the chart.) The Nodes are often considers indicators of karma and the karma around the dock in Montgomery, where Africans fresh from the deadly “middle passage” were sold as slaves, is thick.
I had previously associated this Pluto to the Nodes square with the heat wave and climate change, which is a another matter steeped in karma. Now I wonder if we are also going to see more altercations that reflect the karma of race in this country. The aspect will remain close thoughout August and into September and Pluto shows up on the Ascendant of every American city at one time or another during the day. This could be a long, hot summer in more ways than one.
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Following the Moon: Aug. 1, 2023
The New Moon chart for July 17 (click here here to see the article and the chart) featured the Sun and the Moon in the Ninth House. I felt this indicated movement in the matters currently before the court. We got plenty of that during this past lunation period. First we had the judge in the Hunter Biden case withdraw a previous plea deal. Then we had new charges added to one of the two indictments against Donald Trump, along with rumbles of a impeding third.
One thing I got wrong, however, involved the conjunction of Mercury to the Midheaven in that New Moon chart. I thought it might highlight the media, since Mercury is associated with communication. Instead, we got Mercury’s association with commerce and travel in the form of threats of a strike by delivery drivers at UPS. We can thank the square of Jupiter to Mercury in that chart for the fact that, at this time, it seems that such a strike has been avoided.
The Full Moon chart for Aug. 1 (click here to see the chart) is similar to the New Moon chart. Once again we have the Sun in the Ninth House with the Moon in the Third and we have a planet conjunct the Midheaven. In this chart it is retrograde Venus, which is square Uranus and quincunx Neptune.
