Robert Phoenix

Whatever gets through the night, it’s all right, it’s all right.” (John Lennon)

Uranus just joined the retrograde parade along with Jupiter, Neptune AND Pluto. That’s four celestial heavyweights, all dancing backwards through space and time, titans, returning yet again, through the houses, where they have meaning.

Something is stirring, whirling, whirring, churning towards the eclipse on the horizon, where the darkened Moon in the shadow of The Goat opposes the loving and nurturing Cancer Sun on 7/7 (hmmmmmmm?).

The upcoming eclipse portends something dark, potentially ominous, positively transformational. Is it to be feared? Respected? Ridden like an onyx serpent through the uncertainty of night? It’s not what it seems–nothing is–beneath the eclipse of the moon.

See through the darkness. Feel your way up the belly to the source of life. It is a time for grasping and groping answers, for meaning, for order and yet, this Moon asks us to surrender to our instincts, the true magnetic north of our souls, that which pulls us through to the other side.

The other side of the Moon is where the journey ends, in the hearth and home of pure, psychic immersion and oneness. But the path from here to there is almost invisible.

What we do know is that Pluto in Capricorn is making tracks. It’s rising in power and force and as I have chronicled here before, Pluto is and will be opposing planets in The US chart. Key planets. This Full Moon, eclipsed will also do the same. I have no idea what will transpire, but there is faith that is born out of tempests and furies.

Find your God and find your faith.

As these divine mysteries occasionally do, clues are left to confirm that we may indeed be on the right path, as the same degree of Uranus’s retrograde start (26 degrees), the Sabian Symbol for the Moon in Capricorn is the following; “Pilgrims Climbing The Steep Steps Leading To A Mountain Shrine.” Here again we are witness to a journey, one that requires a fair amount of endurance, purpose and commitment. As Uranus sextiles The Moon at the same degree, the Sabian Symbol for Pisces is; “The Harvest Moon Illumines A Clear Autumnal Sky.” Here we see the promise of radiance, fullness and luminescence after the shrouded specter of the moon passes, but is the promise merely an illusion? An ephemeral reflectionof hope?

We’ll find out soon enough.

The King of Pop And The Prince Of Cherry Poppin’.

More, more Michael Jackson, MJ 24/7. The media is now officially feasting on the emaciated corpse of his legacy. We’re talking about a news cycle that will be long and deep. Get used to it. Court battles, rumor, intrigue, innuendo, biographies, TV specials, you name it. Michael Jackson’s death and life will hang like a skin-bleached specter over lives throughout the summer and beyond (side note, the MJ suicide count is up to ten now).

But there will be a backlash when Uranus goes retrograde and opposes Saturn in Virgo one last time. People will have had enough and the public debate will then turn to the ethics of piling on the King Of Pop. Once Uranus slams it into reverse and Saturn plods forward towards their fated conjunction, the media will cannibalize themselves. They’ll eat until there’s nothing left and then they’ll eat each other. Now that’s going to be some good viewing.

Meanwhile, The Big O admin will put the petal to the metal on health care reform, the clean waters act, the anti-hate speech bill, etc, as quickly as possible to capitalize on the feeding frenzy of Michael and who knows who else. By the way, has anyone seen Joe Biden lately?

I did my post on Michael and I’ll do one more unless it’s vital that I stay with the topic of his life and death.

I’m fascinated with the parallels between Michael and Prince. In fact Michael even named a son after the purple one. Michael and Prince occupy the esoteric duality of Mercury. Michael being the Virgo and Prince, Gemini. Both had tempestuous relationships with their respective fathers and both rose to fame at roughly the same time, but they couldn’t have been more different. Read the rest of this entry »

When Iron Mike had a leaner build and a fatter wallet

A little late on the draw again today, but sometimes, that’s how these things go. The day is nearly done here on the edge of the continent, but I still have a few hours to reflect on the birthday and life of Mike Tyson.

A few years back, I thought that the ultimate reality show would have been Mike Tyson and Michael Jackson together, in the same house, rehabbing their lives and images. I’m I am shocked that no one ever thought of this and if they did, even more surprised that neither Jackson or Tyson would have accepted this. They were both being handled The Nation of Islam. The ratings would have been off the charts and both Mike’s could have settled some debts and made a little cash on the side. But we’ll never know now.

Mike Tyson’s star is rising again, albeit amidst the recent tragedy of his young daughters death. “Tyson” by James Toback (whom I recently interviewed) the biopic, was released to critical acclaim. He did a star cameo turn in the recent hit, “The Hangover,” just a had an Ali vs.Tyson video game released and will be portrayed by Jaimie Foxx in an upcoming movie based on his life. It seems as though “Iron Mike” is back in the ring of life.

Tyson’s exact time of birth is not public, but we can certainly see that from the angles in his chart, their are angels and demons fluttering in and out of his life.

When we look at the life of a warrior, and make no mistake, Tyson is a warrior, we look to Mars.

Mars in Tyson’s chart is problematic and might have destroyed a lesser spirit. His natal Mars in restless Gemini (Mars 22 degrees) squares his natal Pluto, Uranus and Starurn, while opposing his natal Moon. Mars squaring Uranus is combustible, erratic and unpredictable. Mars squaring Pluto can be self-destructive, addictive, violent and driven towards some form of regeneration through close encounters with death. Read the rest of this entry »

“The infant boy struggles against his father’s hands, fighting the narcissistic father’s desire to bind or murder him; and he struggles against the swaddling bands, fighting the narcissistic mother’s desire to change him into what she wants. When the boy fails to get free…he learns to sulk… he becomes passive to his own hurts….” Robert Bly

So it’s been a while since I posted (a week is a long time for me). I’ve been dealing with filtering lots of info and trying to get a sense with what’s appropriate for the site and of course there’s plenty to talk about regarding the passing of Michael Jackson (Virgo) and I wanted to give the subject and Michael’s passing a few days before commenting on him and what might be the meta-meaning, especially as it relates to astrology. I think enough time has passed to look at Jackson’s passing from many angles. So let’s shoot the rapids down the rabbit hole and see where we go.

On an archetypal level. one could easily predict that Michael was not long for this world. Whether it was a health or wealth issue, Jackson was living on borrowed time.

One of the most meaningful books I read in my early twenties was written by one of Carl Jung’s proteges, Marie Louise Von Franz. Von Franz started off as an assistant for Jung and eventually became a Jungian therapist and an important one in her own right. The book she wrote was “Puer Ateernus” which loosely translates into, “Eternal Youth.” In “Puer Aterenus” Von Franz uses two examples of prolonged adolescence in literature, the main and most important one being “The Little Prince” by Antoine De Saint Exupery. In it, she weaves the story of “The Little Prince” with that of Exupery’s own life and case studies of men who, in essence, refuse to grow up. Exupery was a pilot and spent a lot of time flying (not grounded) away from his wife and her mother, whom Exupery considered oppressive and meddling. In this flight from terrestrial responsibility, Von Franz saw a man who was not willing to confront the challenge of channeling his masculinity and dealing with the rigors of responsibility. She makes allusion after allusion that “The Little Prince” is in actuality Exupery himself and that their fates were intertwined.

Von Franz rejected the idea that Exupery was an artist, she claimed that he was not someone committed to the psychic rigors of being a dedicated and successful artist. She felt that Exupery at best was an auteur and at worst a dilletante, who simply played at being an artist, much in the same way a child would.

In many regards, this completely fits Michael Jackson’s profile, everything from “Moonwalking” (not on Earth) to Capt. Eo, to Neverland (Peter Pan) he occupied the same flighty atmospheres as Exupery and his Little Prince. Michael was a puer incarnate. He avoided real intimacy much like Exupery, even though he had children (well sort of). While I don’t want to disrespect the life of Michael, I’m not sure that he was a great artist. He didn’t play anything, didn’t really write much of his own material and was not heralded as a producer (that honor would go to Quincy Jones, Jackson’s opposite, with Sun in Pisces). He was a performer, like the man whom he is most often compared to, Elvis Presley (Capricorn). He was one of the best, but he was not an artist along the same lines as say Prince (more on him later). In essence, Jackson fit the profile of the puer to a tee and his inability to ground himself in relationships and intimacy would doom him to the gravitational pull of the spirit realm, flight out of the body, escaping from the chains of this mortal coil.

Getting a fix on Jackson’s chart is not easy. Astrotheme has him as a Libra Rising, which would place his Moon, in Pisces, in his fifth house. Read the rest of this entry »

Bomb Iran? Why stop there? NASA has bigger plans.

The Cancer new Moon, conjunct my natal Mars at 0 degrees Cancer had me fidgety, edgy and nervous all day yesterday. I couldn’t fall asleep till past 3am. All I wanted to do was crawl back into my shell, but I seemed to have the left said shell elsewhere. But as Steely Dan once wisely and presciently penned;

“Any major dude with half a heart would tell you my friend, any modern world that falls apart comes together again, when the devil is at your door, in the morning light it won’t be there no more, any major dude will tell you.”

There’s something to chaos theory. You know, like when a lobsterman passes gas in Maine, there’s a coup in Honduras, that sort of thing. It’s the theory that seemingly unrelated and random events are tied to other events that erupt and occur around the planet. Let’s take what’s happening in Iran for instance. This is no mere dust up, some contentious turf war between various sects that rises from tim-to-time. Nope, this is full on chaos, or so it seems on the surface. Nothing is as it appears to be in the nights where the moon casts no shadow. While The US media, including revolutionary technologies such as Facebook, Twitter and Google were up to their eyeballs in the story, portraying, hyping, enabling, are we seeing the full picture? Read the rest of this entry »

Editors note. The player I wrote about in this piece, was Darrell Rasner, whose contract has since been sold by The Yankees to Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles of The Japanese League. Rasner now makes roughly $1.2 million a year and . . . they don’t heckle in Japan. This was originally posted last year, but thought I would re-post it today (even if it’s a little on the late side)

The other night (Actually June 10th, 2008) I was at The A’s game with my four-year-old son.  They were playing The Yankees and we were sitting on the first base, visiting side.  The row in front of us was occupied with people wearing black, so it was a foregone conclusion in my mind that they were Yankee fans, which filled nearly half the stadium.My son and I had brought a bicycle horn with us which we used as a rally horn.  Well it was slightly obnoxious and it worked pretty well as The A’s scored six runs in the fourth inning.  As is my custom at games, I heckle the opposing team and the severity of it depends on who I am with and how much alcohol I’ve consumed.  That night I had had just one beer and was with my young son, so it was the Disney version of insults and yet, I must have been pretty effective, because aftter I had loudly proclaimed that “the pitcher needed to return to the minors,” the guy sitting in front of me, turns and barks, “Enough is enough.  That’s my boy out there and you’ve ridden him pretty hard since the game started.  Just leave it alone.”

I was shocked.

The pitcher was his son!

He then punctuated his loyalty by telling me that he had had a fair amount to drink and was in no mood for my heckling.

I reached around and patted him on the chest and told him that, “If I had known it was your son, I would not have been so hard on him” and that, “I wished his son nothing but the best.”  Mercifully, he took an early shower, thanks in part to a terrible play at first by Jason (pornstache) Giambi which ignited The A’s six-run-rally (lots of horn blasts!!).

When it became clear that this was The A’s night, we packed up and left a little early ourselves.

Much to my surprise, I met the pitchers father on the BART platform.  He told me that “God brought me back so that he could apologize” and that, “He felt like and ass.”  We talked about his son’s career and how he got to pitch for The Yankees.  Again, I wished him and his son well.

Being a father, albeit at the opposite end of the child rearing spectrum, I could relate to this man.  If that were my boy struggling in front of 30,000 people and if the guy behind me was even good naturedly ribbing him, I’d probably say something as well.  In fact, I’d probably think a little less of this dad if I had known that the pitcher was his son and he had said nothing at all, because even if his anger was a little over-the-top, it was a meter for how much he loved his kid. He was still the little boy that he played catch with and probably taught to throw a curve and rode to get good grades, stay clean and all of the other tough things a parent must do in order to not only promote success but ensure a safe arrival to adulthood.  His was a primal response to a member of his tribe, a close bond united by blood and nearly half a lifetime. I respected his fierceness in the face of even mild heckling.  While it might have made his kid cringe a little to know what had transpired, he no doubt would have also been thankful that the one guy who stuck up for him in his moment of defeat, was the same guy that had stuck up for him for all of his life–his dad.

As Fathers Day arrives, a fake, Hallmark holiday that I usually try avoid like Bird Flu, it will have a different meaning for me this year as I remember the semi-soaked, fraternal bond between two dads who had brought both of their kids to a basball game.

Psychic Bloomsday.

The Summer Solstice is upon us as The Sun enters Cancer at 0 degrees. The Moon and Mercury are closely conjoined, exact in fact at 8 degrees at the time of this writing, which is just before midnight, Lemurian Standard Time. Venus and Mars are also in celestial entanglement, separated by a mere one degree (14/15). This trio represents an elemental trinity that can really fire the engines of manifestation. Potent Cancerian Sun opens the floodgates of feeling and healing.

Let it in.

Give thanks for the emotional bounty in your life, no matter what the size or portion and if you’re not satisfied with your emotional lot in life, don’t fight it, give thanks the best you can and open to the psychic flow that can take you on journey through loss and beyond. Whether you want to affirm or surrender, the longest of days emotional resonance is prime spiritual conduit.

The speed of life manifests as thought, tightly wired between Mercury and The Moon. Thoughts become things. Synchronicities are off the charts. Pay attention. The veil between worlds becomes gauzelike, opaque and gossamer light. The power of Taurus can make it all real if you really want it. Relax into the magic, wherever it takes you. The most important Summer of your life is here.

PS, Dad, it wasn’t perfect and yet, it was.

Is this The Summer Of The Beloved?

Through a confluence of a number of events like attending last weeks Harmony Fest in Santa Rosa, Jah Levi’s birthday bash and adding a whole new host of Facebook friends, I can certainly claim that Jupiter and Neptune in Aquarius is broadcasting it’s blissed out message in full effect. Raw food radicals, tantric tricksters and ecstatic mechanics are reveling in the feel good vibe. Facebook is brimming with light and love, praise and ahhhs, awe for the electric miracle of life, bleeding green and kissing the old paradigms a sweet goodbye. Compassionate communication reigns supreme and raw cacao is passed about like the new holy sacrament. It’s the new soma, passed down from the Mayan time lords, the sweet sustenance of lunation and harmonic cycles, raw and ready to go off in roughly three years.

2012 has become the new age rapture and anything that remotely smacks of negativity is eschewed; It’s a comedown, a trip into an old rat hole, a self-fulfilling prophecy of yesterdays doom. Michael Beckwith shares the glories of the secret as amethyst hosannas rise up from the masses. Kirtan is the new rock and roll and the call and response of ancient bhajans, the language of sound is ready to be commodified. Suits are smelling profit and dropping in for the ride, donning the robes of holy brothers in lieu of Brothers Brooks. The scene is swelling and the summer, rife with festivals and escape velocity is just about to enter the transcendental curve of the elliptical orbit.

Can it really be happening? Are enough positive vibes simply going to negate the gravity of other social conditions like a possible intervention in Iran, North Korea’s nuclear chest thump, deeper penetration and more war into Pakistan, the eventual demise of the dollar and perhaps forced vaccinations based on the constantly mutating swine flu? Is the innocence and agape of the times enough to shift other forces or are they simply an expression childlike denial and magical thnking?

Sandwiched between Jupiter and Neptune in Aquarius, is Chiron in Aquarius–the wounded healer of the zodiac, Chiron points to the achilles heal of the sign it occupies and here in Aquarius it can reveal the shadow side of the new age, the soft underbelly where hope isn’t a sinewy and defined enough muscular response to the times at hand. Chiron in Aquarius in many regards is The Fool in Tarot. The Fool as the 0 and 22nd card in the major arcana has always been associated with Uranus and Aquarius. Here with Chiron in Aquarius, we see the fools folly on display with it’s best and worst traits of trust and innocence. Chiron in Aquarius can illicit a cultural naivete that borders on narcissistic solipsism. Jupiter and Neptune create a field of vast potential. Chiron urges careful examination and an almost surgical perspective in the light of the situation. Adding to all of this is of course Saturn in Virgo.

Whle the abundance of Aquarian energy is really coalescing, Saturn in Virgo is demanding that we don’t try to escape the details, the nitty gritty, the not-so-sexy matter of facts like the skyrocketing price of food and gas, the escalation of war, the chemtrails constantly accruing in our skies, the weird weather and pesky little things like Obama’s plan for preventative detention and so on. Saturn in Virgo drills down into the fractal schema of bad vibes, bad weather and bad karma. It squares off against the raging utopia that’s being erected in the imagination of the sky dreamers, berry eaters and bliss merchants. Where will it all congeal and meet in a confluence of the spirit and the will? My best guess is when Saturn ramps up to 22 degrees in Virgo, in an exact quinqunx Jupiter in Aquarius and Neptune with an orb of 2 degrees, opposing Uranus in Pisces, yet again (thanks Kit). This is where the rubber will meet the road as they say, when idealism confronts realism head on, where the social condition sparks against the imaginal and the magical. Who will prevail? I think it all depends on the quality of the imagination, the potency of the dream and the will to activate it. A head in the clouds approach works best with the feet on the ground.

Make it real children of Aquarius. Build your communities now. Stay in the flow of love, but don’t take your eye off the ball. A wise man once said, “be wise like serpents” and as the serpentine fire flows from the root to the fruit as you chant and twirl, let it rest at your eyes for a while and gaze into things as they are as much as you’d wish them to be.

The Art Of Darkness?

My first experience with Art Bell came on a trip down from Seattle to California, during that long stretch from Shasta, through the torrid middle of the state. I caught the faint and crackling signal just outside of Shasta and followed it intently, all the way to Oakland, where I was living. It was during Bell’s Sunday night program, “Dreamland” named for the semi-secret base, also known as Area 51, just down the road from Bell’s home and home studio in Parhump, Nevada.

On that particular show, Bell had on Preston Nichols and Al Bielek, two rather fascinating, if eccentric participants in the continuum of The Philadelphia Experiment and The Montauk project.

I sat riveted for literally hundreds of miles as Nichols and Bieleck not only recounted on what took place on The USS Eldridge in Philadelphia harbor, that fateful day, on October 28th, 1943, but also where two of the time travelers arrived in Montauk, Long Island, where they were supposedly being waited upon by researchers on the other end. The semi-popular, yet often ridiculous TV series, “The Time Tunnel” was based on this, as was the movie, “The Philadelphia Experiment” by John Carpenter. Bielek claims to be the love survivor of the experiment, but to make matters even more clouded and occluded, Bielek has another personality known as “Ed Cameron” who was deeply involved in Montauk.

Nichols for his part, claims to be a scientist that worked at Montauk (now shut down) and was talking about what they did at Montauk, which included everything from time travel. to space jumping (mostly to mars) to creating a race of highly trained, super assassins ala Jason Bourne, known as “The Montauk Boys” and casual commerce with alien species on frequent basis. This was my first dose of Art Bell.

Someone at Bell’s network saw the numbers spike whenever Bell touched on the paranormal, every Sunday night, so they decided to make Art the late-night-mage of all things paranormal. He ditched his more mainstream, politics driven show for a full time go at things that go bump in the night.

Unable to pick up Bell in The Bay Area, I used to dial him in from a station in Reno, or San Antonio, which made the program even slightly more exotic, picking up the waves of transmission from somewhere as out there as the programming itself.

In addition to people like Nichols and Bielek, Bell would feature the who’s who of the UFO circuit, everyone from Bob Lazar, to John Lear, to Stan Friedman, You never knew if their stories were real or some sort of fabrication or misdirection, but that was half the fun of listening to Bell. He also pitched products like smoked salmon and crank radios (now isn’t that a funny little aside?), which gave the show a feel that was more 50’s than 90’s. Indeed, the height of Bell’s popularity took place just before the internet broke through to mainstream use. Late at night, Bell was in some ways the radio equivalent of the internet for the strange and unexplained. Read the rest of this entry »