Last Sunday here in Calgary, two heavily armed men of Middle Eastern descent named Mohammed entered a crowded night club and started shooting people. Now, what’s the first word that comes to mind when you hear this?
(pause)
…starts with a “T”…
(pause)
Keep this news story in mind. I’ll get back to it later.
***
(Wondering what the next few months hold in store for you? Write me with your date, time, and place of birth — and I’ll send you a free sneak preview!)
Last time, I wrote about the importance of not jumping to conclusions based on one or two astrological factors. A reader of this blog recently contacted me with some grave concerns about his birth chart. He sent me a chart that was produced online and addressed some concerns of his brought up by various interpretations of it he had found. And by “addressed some concerns of his,” I mean he was “freaked out by some of the stuff he had read about his birth chart online.” Here are a couple of examples:
“(I have) a tremendously afflicted 14°Aries Ascendant…”
Okay, hold up there. First of all “tremendously afflicted” is pretty subjective. Yes, your Ascendant is ruled by Mars in Cancer (which is a difficult placement) which is square your Ascendant, and your Ascendant is square your Mercury. But that Mars is ruled by Moon in Taurus (which is the Moon’s exalted placement), and takes a sextile from Venus. So yes, your Ascendant may look like it’s in rough shape if you go by the standards of a typical online interpretation (or one out of a book), but going by isolated interpretations misses out on the larger picture. When computers become right-brained enough to see larger patterns like this readily, it won’t just be the astrologers who are out of a job.
Admittedly, Mars square Saturn in your chart is problematic. But no one (and no birth chart) is perfect. Mars square Saturn could make for a bad temper… but Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis has Mars square Saturn, and so far as I know the only person she ever beat was “most of the rest of the planet,” and only in terms of net wealth. The aspect made her a dedicated worker despite having been born into a lot of money and then marrying into more of it (twice).
“…my 26° Taurus Moon in the 2nd House is EXACTLY opposite Uranus at 26°Scorpio in the 8th House. I read in a few articles that having that specific Moon/Uranus aspect(especially being in the 2nd & 8th houses) can be an indicator of having a sudden, unexpected & violent death…”
First of all: if you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you’ll know I’m not afraid to discuss the astrology of death, and the more I learn and observe, the less obvious the role of the 8th House actually seems to have with death. I sometimes wonder if the 8th House wouldn’t be more accurately described as ruling “concerns about death or matters pertaining to the dead.” Secondly: both the Moon and Uranus are in their exalted placements. Even with the opposition, they’re both pretty strong.
There you go. It’s not all so bad after all, is it?
***
Now, what the heck does this all have to do with The Two Shooting Mohammeds?
The police have officially ruled out terrorism as a motive. In fact, anyone doing at little digging would have soon discovered that at least one of the suspects had a record of some very non-Islamic Fundamentalist drug charges, and that no statements of terrorist intent were issued before or after.
None of this stopped some of the more sensationalist/politically biased web sites out there from reporting this as a terrorist act, because hey… feeding into people’s fears is a great way to get those clicks, isn’t it? But of course, we are all in a self-induced tailspin about terrorism these days, aren’t we? Sure, terrorism is a bad thing… but because of its dramatic nature we’ve all become too focused on it. We’ve made ourselves worse, less accepting, and less free people not because of terrorism so much as the fear of terrorism. Don’t do that to yourself over a canned interpretation of something in your birth chart.
You aren’t doomed because of a couple of placements or aspects. You certainly aren’t doomed because of bad or incomplete interpretations of those placements or aspects. If you are an American, you are statistically more likely to be killed by an elevator, lightning, prescription painkillers, hypothermia, botched cosmetic surgery, food poisoning, or an attacking pet than by terrorism… and no one has declared a War on any of those lately, have they?
Let’s all just relax and be logical… and when in doubt, call your astrologer.
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