Saturday, being the first means that my temp job requires my presence should I be available. I was. Got out of bed, typed on something for a while, surfed around and hit a few fun sites, then I rolled through a news site. Lost a space shuttle.
William Gibson is an author I’ve grown quite fond of over the years, or, at least, I’ve taken quite a liking to his canon of work. He poignantly captures the moment in a short entry in his web journal.
Astronomically, what was going on? Dark of the moon. Midmorning in NE Texas. Astrologically? Moon conjunct Sun conjunct Neptune, in Aquarius – oppose Jupiter in Leo. Tough call. I’d spoken about this before type of arrangement before, and I’ve looked at global indications and events, more along the lines of the spiritual side of life rather than the physical, but the two are tied together.
Taking that long route to the bus stop again, I paused long enough to calculate and examine the basic chart for the moment. One characteristic stood out, one aspect, a rolling conjunction between the Sun, the Moon and Neptune. Neptune is a source of deception, at times, and it can obfuscate even the clearest of matters.
There’s a spiritual side to Neptune as well, something portion that can test faith, or make one’s faith stronger, or reveal some hidden aspect of one’s faith. But oppose that spiritual obfuscation and confusion with mighty Jupiter in Leo? I was guessing at a figurative explosion, not a real one, laid bare in all its flaming gory glory, splashed over the morning media.
A year or two ago, I had a chance to see a space shuttle streak through the evening sky, a brilliant line of light moving at some incredible speed as it fell to earth after a mission. It arced across the Texas sky, basically northeast, a brilliant streak. The strange, almost ironic point is the technology is older than some of my clients. That space shuttle was “born” in a time before phones were about the size of a small box of matches. A big desktop computer had enough memory to contain maybe a portion of this journal entry, but not much more. And that was the best there was, at the time.
With Jupiter in opposition, I wonder what illusions are being shattered? Our technological superiority?
There’s sentiment, above and beyond the sadness associated with the deaths of some brave souls who burned up on return home, a faith in a technology, an invincible nature, that this just usually doesn’t touch us. Bad things don’t happen. But that Leo-Aquarius [fixed fire and fixed air signs> axis brought a fiery termination to something, perhaps something much bigger than just the loss of life.
One of my cousins was enrolled at the university where some of the advance work on the heat-reflecting tiles was done, and he posted along a thoughtful e-mail. He’s trained as a scientist and an engineer – nothing to do with the art of astrology.
My concern is less on the impact within the academic and scientific circles, and more on the outcome of he general psyche of the world. The scientific method is one where a hypothesis is posited, then tested with experimental process, then the results are compared, then one piece is changed in light of the experimental results, and a new hypothesis is posited, tested, and so on. It’s how inquiry works.
In part, it’s what I do in a reading, or, in a broader sense, with my horoscopes. Posit a theory, write a weekly scope to test that idea, if it plays out true, then I have more data to work with. If it doesn’t pan out correctly, then I change my way of looking at something.
What does that have to do with the space shuttle, Neptune and Jupiter? Not a lot. Or, maybe it was fiery end to a theory – I only hope that we keep exploring the boundaries.
