Astrology - Grand Water Trine, two different views

Sun: 29'Cancer
Moon: 18'Capricorn
1 Day to Full Moon

So.  A friend of mine emailed a group we are both part of on Wednesday (good day for mass emailings, being that that's Mercury's day) regarding a major astrological configuration coming exact this past Thursday.  Specifically, Mars + Jupiter in Cancer, Saturn in Scorpio and Neptune in Pisces, all coming to trine one another for the Grand Water Trine pattern.

Now, the Grand Trine happens fairly often - I have one in my own natal chart, across the Air signs.  But usually when it happens it involves the fast-moving Moon and only lasts for a few hours, or it'll split elements (one planet sitting in a different element than the other two when it occurs close to a cusp).  It's a lot rarer to get the much-slower social and generational planets involved across the same element: Jupiter, as the fastest of those three, still takes about a year to transit the 30 degrees of just one sign, and they stay together for a bit when it happens both prior to and after the most exact point.

I find it interesting to hear how the same aspect patterns can spark totally different takes on it.

National Pollinator Week kicks off - with a huge bee kill

Sun: 29' Gemini
Moon: 28'Scorpio
Waxing Gibbous - 3 days before Full

My sister Alohi, who runs the blog Tales of Alohi, tipped me off to this story on OregonLive earlier this morning:

25,000 bumblebees killed, dropping from trees in Wilsonville; pesticide suspected

 25,000 bees.  55 trees, known to have been sprayed with neonicotinoid pesticides just days before as National Pollinator Week began.

The European Union has issued a continent-wide ban on the use of these "neonic" pesticides.  Why?  Because they have found sufficient evidence for concern that the extreme toxicity of these insecticides (to bees as well as to the insects they're intended to kill) is contributing significantly to Colony Collapse Disorder - observed worldwide among farmers and beekeepers for years now.  The evidence is strong enough that Vladimir Putin almost refused to meet with Secretary of State John Kerry because his outrage and fury over America's support for the companies that make them - including Monsanto, Bayer, and Syngenta.

If you like to eat, you may want to keep reading this one...

Elemental shrines

Sun: 14' Gemini
Moon: 08'Taurus
Dark of the Moon

A short post tonight.  Now that our home's central altar is up and running, my husband and I are in the process of putting up several small elemental shrines around the house.  So far, one is in progress, the other three are in conceptual form.

Where we live in Hawaii is urbanized, but when you close your eyes and strip out the city from your awareness and focus on what is behind it, the elements are screaming to be heard.  This land, this solid earth, is born of fire from water's embrace, kissing the sky as the winds play over the mighty pali (cliffs) under the heat of the tropical sun.  You can't miss it, if you quiet down half a second to listen.  It's easy to overlook the origins of your land on the continents: when the volcanoes that gave rise to your island are still watching over you (and are still active or potentially so!), you don't forget.

The Global March Against Monsanto

Today was the global March Against Monsanto.  While I don't expect that a march with the astrological configuration it had will have much effect anywhere in the world, and less here where it was begun and completed on a Saturday, entirely within the local planetary hour of Venus, it may yield some networking for those with the power to make the changes necessary.  (I addressed the astrological chart for the March in a previous post.)  But my husband and I marched anyway to offer our support for policies and legislation that will break Monsanto's hold on our local Hawaiian agriculture and help break its stranglehold on the nation's food supply, the first time either of us has really gotten into political activism.

25May2013 Lunar Eclipse and the March Against Monsanto

There will be a penumbral Lunar Eclipse on that day at 04'08"Sagittarius. According to CafeAstrology, the Sabian symbol for that degree is:

"An old owl sits alone on the branch of a large tree."

I don't use the Sabians often, but I find they frequently have chilling accuracy with regards to eclipses, and the effects of an eclipse will reverberate for six months after a lunar or a year after a solar (until the Sun returns to the eclipsed degree and begins a new cycle).

On that day, a worldwide protest is scheduled to protest the use and development of genetically-modified organisms (GMOs), which are at this point a large portion of our food supply and are showing devastating links to major health issues, the evolution of "superweeds" and the overuse of pesticides, which is contributing to the sharp crash in the global domesticated bee population (or, as some call it, the Bee-pocalypse) that threatens the global food supply.

Given the conjunction of these two events, and also in respect to the multiplicity of events and times on that day, I will explore the astrology of the march, without tying my interpretation down to any particular location.  (The chart is drawn for Greenwich, ENG for convenience and uses the time as given by NASA.  Though the Sun and Moon are about a degree off exact in the chart as shown, the difference is negligible and will not affect chart interpretation.)
I will join this March Against Monsanto and support it locally, but I hold out little hope of it actually creating the change that needs to be made. Astrologically, it's just not there.  The symbol does not support it - wisdom (owl) goes unheard (alone) by the world (tree), nor does the chart carry the powerful indicators of a sea change.  See below the jump:

The magick of business and mass movements

16 April 2013
Sun: 27' Aries  Moon: 14' Cancer

Psychologists and sociologists have been trying for decades to understand "the mob mentality."  Usually they study it in negative terms: preventing riots and so forth, but occasionally it gets applied to wider social movements.  It does not make sense, how one can get a handful, dozens, hundreds, millions, a whole nation, behind a concept that none would consider on an individual basis - and yet it can be done.  History has borne out the devastating consequences of the misuse of this power.  We see it daily in the insanity of the badly misnamed American "Tea Party," although to be fair there is also a good dose of schitzophrenia there that should be addressed in another post.  And yet, the problem of the "mob mind" might well be best understood as both elementary and elemental.