Hello
Weekly Hello
MONDAY, 6 January – SUNDAY, 12 January
Hello!
Well, here we are – 2025! And how was your New Year celebration? Here in Blighty the first wave of polar weather hit many major events, but a cancellation or two was not enough to freeze spirits! My first thought on New Year’s Day, and every morning since, is that Earth is now tilting toward the Sun, and each day the light lasts longer.
I put the last full-stop on the last of my year-aheads on the morning of the 30th. It was quite the marathon this year, but well worth the effort. Thank you all for your emails and messages. Now, I have to put together my talks for Decoding the Divine, the conference Steve Judd and I will be holding in February. We have two or three spaces left should you want to join us. It promises to be a very special occasion with attendees coming from San Francisco, New York, Dubai and Bristol! LINK to the Conference
Looking out on the week ahead, Neptune is in pride of place so don’t be surprised if your world looks ever so slightly blurry. Mist and fog aside, check and recheck information and remember not everyone is telling you the whole truth and nothing but the truth. And that includes our leaders and the media. Unless and until you can see it, touch it and bank it, don’t buy into it.
Friday Bite
Astrology of the Week’s Main Global Events
by
Penny Thornton
The 2025 forecasts – written and audio – have been posted and are much more extensive relative to previous years.
VIEW THE FORECASTS HERE
Friday Bite: 3 January 2025
Point Counterpoint
“The H-1B program is neither high-skilled nor immigration: these are temporary foreign workers, imported from abroad, for the explicit purpose of substituting for American workers at lower pay…. I will end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program, and institute an absolute requirement to hire American workers first…. No exceptions.” Donald Trump, 4 March 2016
“[t]ake a big step back and F*CK YOURSELF in the face … I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.” Elon Musk 24 Dec 2024
“Beyond being elected to the Presidency or being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Jimmy Carter’s legacy is best measured in lives changed, saved and uplifted,” Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albenese
“His significant role in achieving the peace agreement between Egypt and Israel will remain etched in the annals of history, and his humanitarian work exemplifies a lofty standard of love, peace, and brotherhood,” Egyptian President, Abdel Fattah el-Sissi
CHRISTMAS AND NEW Year have come and gone but it was business as usual as far as the cosmos was concerned. An applying Mars-Pluto opposition takes no account of holidays and high days, and its work is still not done. I’m going to take another look at this mighty aspect in this Friday Bite but first, some of the key global events that took place over the past ten days and under the canopy of this transformational influence.
On Christmas Day, an Azerbaijan plane on its way from Baku to Grozny in Chechnya crashed not far from an area where Russian air defences had been taking down Ukrainian drones. Preliminary results showed the plane was struck by a Russian air-defence system – the jet’s communications were paralysed by Russia’s electronic warfare systems. Thirty-two of the sixty-two passengers and five crew survived.
Jeju Air, flight 7C 2216 from Bangkok to Muan was not so lucky. On 29 December, the Boeing 737 crash-landed at Muan International Airport, slid off the runway and hit a cement barrier, bursting into flames on impact. All but two of the 181 people on board were killed. It was South Korea’s worst ever plane crash.
This tragic accident occurred at a time when South Korea is experiencing some of its most intense political turmoil. President Yoon Suk Yeol has been impeached over his failed martial law bid earlier in December, which brought the South Korean people out onto the streets in their hundreds of thousands to protest. Today, Friday, saw a six-hour standoff between investigators attempting to arrest Yoon at the presidential residence for ignoring three summonses to appear for questioning.
Days before the new year came in, President Jimmy Carter passed away. He was one hundred years old. In part, because he had acquired such gravitas since he left the presidency, but largely through his dedication to peace and civil rights, the plaudits came in their thousands from leaders and notable figures across the world. He died as Pluto hovered over his IC (28 degrees Capricorn 28ʹ) and squared his rising Saturn (1 degree Scorpio 55ʹ). His passing, just before a new and troubling political era begins in the United States, seems more than symbolic.
WITH JUPITER SQUARING Saturn on Christmas Eve, the festive season was destined to be one in which constitutional matters in more than one country took precedence over the celebrations. And, indeed they did from Belgrade to Tbilisi. There was also a huge war of words taking place between the nationalists of MAGA and the tech right represented by Elon Musk and his happy band of billionaires – Elon Musk resorting to profanities on X to express his opinions on the H-1B debate.
This is the second time Jupiter and Saturn have squared each other – their first meeting was on 19 August last year and they are set to connect for the third and last time on 15 June. Affairs of state always come into the headlights with this planetary combo, and it is tempting to think that many of the constitutional matters currently at issue in various countries will not be fully resolved until we reach mid-June.
This all-important planetary dynamic is providing the background for the ongoing Mars-Pluto opposition. Which is why, in a nutshell, constitutional matters are provoking violent reactions. Divisions are becoming ever more marked. Actions ever more deadly.
A Mars-Pluto aspect brings together the themes of action, courage, conflict and aggression (Mars) with power and transformation (Pluto). People born with a Mars-Pluto aspect are life’s fighters and transformers: some may respond to the violent dimension of this combination by causing harm while others may choose to put their considerable power to good use. It is our consciousness that makes the difference.
When Mars angles Pluto in transit, it breeds action, courage, conflict and aggression. And we all respond to this dynamic in our own individual ways, more so if we have a natal Mars-Pluto aspect. While it may be impossible to predict that someone would drive a truck at 70 mph through a street of revellers killing fifteen people or that an individual would shoot dead innocent members of the public, including some of his own family and two young children, in a drunken rage, we can predict that simmering tensions will come to boiling point under such an influence.
The above chart erected for sunrise belongs to the forty-two-year-old Texas-born US citizen and Army veteran who drove a rented Ford pickup truck into a crowd of revellers in iconic Bourbon Street in New Orleans in the early hours of January the first. He killed fifteen people and injured thirty-five before he hit a concrete barrier and died in a shootout with police.
I want you to notice that he was born with a Sun-Venus-Pluto-Saturn conjunction currently squared by the Mars-Pluto opposition. His natal Mars-Neptune conjunction, an aspect coincident with martyrdom, has been squared by transiting Neptune since he joined ISIS in the summer of last year.
At the time of the terror attack, Uranus was setting – Uranus has a habit of falling on the angles at the time of an eruption or disaster – and the Moon was within a minute of a conjunction to Pluto and opposing Mars.
The above chart belongs to the highly-decorated Green Beret who drove his rented Tesla Cyber-truck, loaded with fuel canisters and firework mortars, to Las Vegas and parked it outside the Trump International Hotel where he shot himself before the truck exploded. No one died, except Mr Livelsberger, but five were injured.
Here again, Livelsberger’s chart was triggered by the prevailing Mars-Pluto opposition. In this case, his Sun at 29 degrees of Cancer was squared by the transiting opposition. By solar-arc progression, Uranus has reached 29 degrees of Capricorn, opposing his natal Sun. Plus, he had recently undergone his nodal return.
We can assume that both men had been nursing hate and resentments for some time before finally committing thought to action. And they did so when an aspect of violence triggered their natal charts.
THE MARS-PLUTO opposition became exact on 3 November last year at 29 degrees 45ʹ, just before the American election. The run up to the election was, as you may remember, controversial to say the least, however the day itself went smoothly enough and Trump won the presidency. Not, it must be said, by a landslide and, in the weeks that have followed we have come to understand his win over Harris was a mere 1.5 percent and although the Republicans hold the Senate and Congress, it is by the narrowest of margins. Which brings us to today and the rerun of the Mars-Pluto opposition, this time at 1 degree Aquarius and 9 minutes.
As this Friday Bite lands, Congress will be voting for the new speaker of the House. This is a formality, but a speaker has to be chosen in order for the inauguration of a president to take place. And Congress is divided. Mike Johnson has been the speaker since October 2023 and he has the backing of Donald Trump. However, even the backing of the incoming president might not be enough to guarantee his election, at least not in the first ballot.
If Friday goes by with no result, there is still time to achieve one before Monday’s certification of the presidential election. (Without certification the inauguration will be on hold.) Even though the period since Trump’s election has been a pantomime to behold, the Republican party is surely not going to shoot itself in the proverbial foot by allowing division within its ranks to delay the inauguration of its leader.
Since voting for the speaker is the first item on the agenda for the newly elected Congress, the above chart will serve as a guide. That the Moon is conjunct Pisces and is not void-of-course is what you might call a good start, and it is backed up by a sextile between the Sun in Capricorn in the tenth house of leadership and Saturn, the ruler of the tenth house. The only factor standing in the way of a win for Mr Johnson is the Mars-Pluto opposition. Fortunately, or not, depending on your point of view, this opposition is not angular but Mars is the ruler of the chart and its opposition to Pluto, the closest aspect, which gives it extra power.
At worst, a speaker will not be chosen on Friday, but I suspect come Monday, certification will take place and probably with Mike Johnson in situ.
But don’t hold your breath. This Mars-Pluto opposition will hold sway until the 24 January, and before then there is a full moon in Cancer conjunct Mars, which will fall on Donald Trump’s natal Saturn.
My instincts inform me that there is far worse to come, whether the violent acts of January the first in New Orleans and Las Vegas are precursors to much more and much worse or because, under the cover of dark, Machiavellian plots have been afoot and the letter of the constitution, in particular the Fourteenth Amendment, section 3, which declares no one taking part in an insurrection can become president, will be invoked, thus bringing a temporary halt to the inauguration.
Watch this space.
Friday Bite: 27 December 2024
I’m not posting a new Friday Bite today, but I thought you might like to read this article I wrote in 2006, a couple of days after Pluto was demoted to the status of a celestial dwarf.
Pluto: Demoted But Not Decommisioned
26 August 2006
To say that astrologers are currently suffering from a surfeit of ruffled feathers is an understatement. On 24 August the International Astronomical Union stripped Pluto of its planetary status and consigned it to relative insignificance among the many celestial objects in the suburbia of the Kuiper Belt. This was a bit of a volte-face by the same Union that had one week earlier officially embraced Pluto as the twelfth member of our solar system…
It was the verdict astrologers were dreading. Since Pluto was discovered in 1930 we have taken this planet to our bosoms. Its discovery synchronized with the development of depth psychology, the rise of Fascism and the gathering gloom of Word War II; its mythological roots lay deep in the underworld, thus we came to associate Pluto with the process of death and re-birth, of transformation. Over the years we have become used to finding Pluto in prominence when events of great magnitude take place – the dropping of the first atomic bomb, on Hiroshima on 6 August1945, occurred in the wake of a sun-Pluto conjunction. So, we astrologers were never going to take the demotion of this mighty planet lightly.
The International Astronomical Union came to its decision by agreeing on a criteria that would define all planets.
1)To be called a planet a celestial body must orbit around a star – ergo our sun – while not in itself being a star.
2)A planet must be large enough in mass for its own gravity to pull it into a nearly spherical shape, and have cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit. (Note: spherical refers to the planet itself, not its orbit, which one astrologer who I will not embarrass by naming, misinformed CNN viewers on 25th August.)
Pluto was disqualified because its orbit overlapped that of Neptune. And thus it went the way of UB 313 (nicknamed Xena), Sedna, Chiron et al.
Now, it will take astrologers time to absorb the new status of Pluto, but we must remember that it hasn’t disappeared from view, so to speak. A rose by any other name is still a rose… Indeed, I said as much when my American husband posed the question at dinner on the night of the 24th, “Well, what are you going to do now that Pluto has become a du-warf?” However, in my researches, I came across an interesting statement by no less a man than Michael Brown, one of the astronomers who discovered UB 313 (Xena) and a member of the aforementioned union:
“From now on everyone should ignore the distracting debates of the scientists. Planets in our solar system should be defined not by some attempt at forcing a scientific definition on a thousands-of-years-old cultural term, but by simply embracing culture. Pluto is a planet because culture says it is… We scientists can continue our debates, but I hope we are generally ignored.”
Well, I’m not sure I like the idea of Pluto being a mere cultural term either, but Mike Brown is at least half-way to promoting the idea that changing a celestial body’s status from planet to dwarf does not alter its meaning. And if a scientist who was party to redefining Pluto can disregard that decision, might we not go along with him and continue to give as much credence to Pluto as we did before its ex-communication.
On the other hand, with Pluto now relegated to the outer solar system and all that flotsam and jetsam, does this not open the door to acknowledging the influence of those thousands of asteroids, which, I must confess, I have ignored for my entire astrological career?
These are early days in the astrological debate that will follow this controversial decision, but my belief is that we can hold Pluto in the same high regard as we always did; its influence has changed not one iota. We have been observing this planet for seventy-six years, noting its significance in world events and its effect on the cycles of human affairs, and it has more than proved itself. And, let’s face it, no self-respecting Scorpio is going to take being ruled by a du-warf without a fight!