Music Monday ~ Pisces, Neptune/Pluto Generation, Townes Van Zandt, Jimmy Nail, Nostalgia.

Two singer/songwriters (and in one case, /actor) with Sun in Pisces came to mind via a kind of chain reaction. March 7, this Wednesday, would have been the birthday of Texan singer/wongwriter Townes Van Zandt. One of his songs, Pancho & Lefty, is a favourite of mine, when feeling country-ish. Searching YouTube for another of his songs to feature, I noticed his version of Dirty Old Town. Huh? That song, another longtime favourite and one that sends pangs of homesick feelings through my bones, was written by Ewan MacColl about the northern English city of Salford. Strange to hear it being sung by an American artist, and a Texan at that! Townes Van Zandt must have admired the song and managed to infuse a different flavour into it, but for me, his cannot equal the songwriter's own version, featured in a post last year - SEE HERE.

Listening again to Dirty Old Town had me longing to hear another homesicky song - one written and sung by actor/singer/songwriter Jimmy Nail: Big River, then I realised that Nail, born 16 March, also has Sun in Pisces.

Pisces probably rules nostalgia, and mild melancholia - homesickness. Several songs of both artists have that in common. I wasn't born in either Salford or Newcastle-on-Tyne (the Big River), but in another northern city on a river: Hull. I suspect that this kind of nostalgia is common to all English northerners (and Scots, and the Irish) when far from home.

These two guys, Townes Van Zandt and Jimmy Nail, born 5,000+ miles, 9 days and 10 years apart, have few things astrologically in common apart from their Sun and Mercury in Pisces, and the fact that neither has any planet in Earth signs. Without access to their times of birth I've set the charts at 12 noon. Both guys' natal Moons were at 21 Leo at noon; natal Moon of both would have to be somewhere in the second half of show-bizzy Leo, whatever their times of birth.

Townes Van Zandt, born into a wealthy Texas oil family fell into severe drug addiction and alcoholism early on, died, too soon, at age 52 .

Jimmy Nail was born in Newcastle-on-tyne, in the north east of England, best-known for his acting roles in TV series Auf Wiedersehen, Pet and Spender; seen in the movie Evita playing the part of Magaldi. He has around half a dozen cd albums to his name and his autobiography, A Northern Soul, was published in 2005.






Why one of these guys would fall into a swamp of addiction and suffer an untimely death wasn't clear to me from his chart initially. However, there's a configuration astrologers call a Yod (Finger of Fate) in Van Zandt's chart. It links Neptune and Pluto in sextile (60*) both planets link to Mercury via quincunx (150*) aspect.

The Neptune/Pluto sextile is a generational one, it'll be common to all born between (roughly) 1943 and 1956 with Neptune in Libra and Pluto in Leo transiting at around 60* apart. This is the generation who came to maturity in the 1960s, Van Zandt was one of the avant garde of that highly creative group, many of whose lives did, eventually and sadly end due to overwhelming addictions. Astrological Neptune connects to addictive tendencies, Pluto to darkness and death.

Bear in mind that Neptune is ruler of Pisces where both guys' Natal Sun and Mercury were at the time of their birth, making Neptune highly significant in the life patterns of these two artists.

Nail was born in one of the last years of that same Neptune/Pluto generation. His chart also has the Yod, in his case it links to his natal Sun - but - perhaps here's the big difference: Nail has a Grand Trine involving Neptune too: Neptune/Jupiter/Mercury. Could it be, I wonder, that this harmonious link of Mercury to benign Jupiter and creative Neptune has outweighed, or at least balanced Neptune's sextile to Pluto in Nail's life pattern, diluting the potential of Pluto's negativity? Just a thought.


And

RIP Davy Jones.

WEEKEND GRAB BAG ~ TIME

Some detail from a book by Robert FitzGerald: Signs of the Times are available via the link. The author divides astrological Ages into more accessible bite-sized chunks called Eras and Phases.

At present we are in transit through the Age of Pisces. By this author's calculation the Aquarius Era of the Pisces Age ran from 1800 to 1980 - which could well account for some astrolgers' insistence that we were already in the Age of Aquarius.

Then, dividing time into even smaller slices, 1950 to 1965 becomes the Aquarius Phase of the Aquarius Era of the Age of Pisces....that slice includes the psychedlic 60s - thought to be quite Aquarian, so with a double dose of Aquarius: phase and era, it was.... with a background of Pisces dreaminess.

1965 to 1980 = Pisces Phase, Aquarius Era, Age of Pisces.

From 1980 to 2160 is the Pisces Era of the Age of Pisces and we are presently in the Gemini Phase - 2010 to 2025 of the Pisces Era of the Age of Pisces.

The Cancer Phase will be 2025 to 2040.

For a brief rundown on what this means, and comparisons with similar eras and phases throughout history, do take a look at the website, linked above.

All that can really be said is that at some indeterminate point in the very distant past, for reasons unknown, there came the moment known to science as t = 0. We were on our way.
(Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything, p.10)

From http://www.timephysics.com/

MEASURING TIME

Be it money, weight, a piece of estate, speed, distance or resistance. We measure by comparison to a standard that we have defined. When we measure a mass we use a standard mass like KG or LB for comparison. Distances we measure using a standard of length like a meter yard or feet. Keeping the above in mind let us think how we measure motion. We use time to measure motion i.e. Feet per second or miles per hour. This provides a hint that when dealing with time we are actually dealing with some standard of motion.

We may have made the concept of time more complicated then what it really is. Measurement of time started early on in human development. There are plenty of clues in every language in the greetings and the meetings. Time of the day is related to the position of sun in the sky or its absence thereof. There is dawn, sunrise, early morning, morning, mid morning, noon, afternoon, late afternoon, evening, sunset, dusk, night and mid night. Then there are years, months, weeks, based on earth’s yearly orbit around the sun and the changing seasons. The use of units like seconds and minutes which are radial angle measurements in geometry points toward the original connection of time measurements to radial motion of astronomical objects across the sky. Once we started using clocks, watches, and then digital time we got completely disconnected from the original method of measurement and time developed a life of its own.

The problem of time may be easy to solve if we go back to the original concept of sun moving across the sky. When we measure the speed of a car, we are just comparing its motion to the motion of the hands of the clock and also indirectly to the fractional motion of sun across the sky. We are not measuring speed with something abstract called time we are just comparing a known motion (of the sun) with an unknown motion of the car.

Time is making fools of us again. ~J.K. Rowling

One from a list of crazy watches;
Relativity watch
Modeled on Einstein's theory of relativity, this Relativity Watch actually makes the numbers move instead of the hands. This, of course, makes you dizzy if you continuously stare at it for more than 12 hours.

(A thought: The movement of this watch somehow seems more akin to the movement of the planets.)

Aside from velcro, time is the most mysterious substance in the universe. You can't see it or touch it, yet a plumber can charge you upwards of seventy-five dollars per hour for it, without necessarily fixing anything.
— Dave Barry

The butterfly counts not months but moments,
and has time enough.

Time is a wealth of change,
but the clock in its parody makes it mere change and no wealth.

Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time
like dew on the tip of a leaf.

(Rabindranath Tagore).

Astrological Ages ~ Are We there Yet?

The complex subject of astrological Ages came up in an unrelated comments conversation here last week. This topic is a constant source of fascination, first and foremost is the question: has the much anticipated Age of Aquarius already begun - or will humanity wait a century or more for its arrival?

I'm copying, below, my comment conversation with Gian Paul, an astrologer who lives in Brazil, sometimes writes posts at Astrology Mundo. Since making my own "off-top-of-head" comments I've refreshed my rusty information on the topic. I've reminded myself that the Ages are calculated, not with direct reference to our tropical zodiac, but by the points at which the Sun enters each astronomical constellation at the vernal equinox, as equinoxes precess. Because the constellations are of varying size, Ages are of varying lengths.

There's good information at astrologer Robert FitzGerald's website "Signs of the Times" - but good as it is, the author still states that "this can use more research by others to verify these conclusions".


The spanner in the astrological works to my mind, though, is that delineation of constellations was a manmade construct. Humans designated the shape, extent and patterns of constellations, who's to say the delineations we use are the correct way to carve up the sky?




All becomes murky. The best we can do, with any certainty, is relate events to astrological symbolism and use that as guide. What we come up with may not be astronomically accurate - but who's to say that astronomy has the last word on this particular topic?

A copy of our recent comment conversation, very lightly edited:

Twilight:

I'd like the age of Aquarius to be coming in quickly. I'm not quite sure what to think on this though, and have tended to accept Robert Hand's view on it - that there's a long way to go yet.

But....and it's a big but...who's to say when the "start date" happened? If that's wrong, then everything is wrong. We don't have a secure "start date" (start date for life on Earth - or conscious life on Earth) as far as I can tell.

Logically I think we still seem to be in a belligerent Age - Taurus, Aries? Astrologers think not. They see Pisces as representing the Age of Christianity and organised religion, ruled by Jupiter. But religion is not all that has gone on these 2000 years. It's not even the important part of what has gone on - although it has been the cause of much mayhem.

So I really don't know - and wonder at times if the whole "Age of...." thing isn't just so much Taurean Excrement aka BS.
;-)


Gian paul:

With around 2000 years, give or take, per sign, one could imagine that some "Ages" may be shorter and others a bit longer. There also might be some overlaps.

In that sense, I wonder if the sacred cows in India and what goes with them, are not remnants of the Age of Taurus. And the (often religious) bellicose events during the Christian Era, possibly an overlap from the Age of Aries - eye for eye and tooth for tooth...

The Christian Era, Pisces, has probably the most precise starting date we know, although there is historical doubt about the actual date of birth of Jesus. Ancient Roman sources (Plinius), diverge by about 5 to 30 years.

And, in case the Era of Aquarius already started, we now assist to the probably normal retro-fighting typical at the end of any civilization (except for the Mayas).

Here now some elements I believe are "Aquarian Age stuff":

* Aviation, very rapid transports
* Communications
* Science, bent towards the atomic,
nano, cyber etc.
* Beliefs, your's Twilight, your friends, me and who participates in this and similar blogs.
* Politics: democracy is being forced open to forces beyond human "manipulation". One man one vote does not function anymore. That started with Hitler/Goebbels, a government democratically elected. "The people" today, all over the world, increasingly know that politicians & Co. manipulate, lie and worse. And The People respond, via the media, arts, even violence and protests, riots (G - 20)...

For whom watches the stars and believes (knows) that they also preside over political events, it's obvious "who governs". How much time it will take for this perception to spread, if it has to do so (?), is open to speculation. One literally would have to look into the "speculum", i.e. the cristal ball.

Living in Brazil (at the frontier of rural Brazil and Metropolis São Paulo, in what remains of the Rain Forest), I can attest that this country is quite Aquarian. One can see that a new wind (air) is blowing, here at least.

The frontiers may be still blurred, but personally I would not be surprised to discover things accelerating, even precipitously. So lets keep watching!
July 03, 2010.

Twilight:

Yes, some overlap of Ages sounds right to me.

Although we know roughly when Christ was born and count that as the dawn of the Age of Pisces, it's the question of how they knew when the whole thing started, and the point from which they started counting that keeps niggling away at my mind. The start of these cycles must have had to be an arbitarily chosen point of when life began on Earth. Which life, which stage though? And whereas the Ages are calculated by the precession of the equinoxes, nobody can be absolutely sure where it would have been correct to have begun counting.

I hope I've written that clearly enough - it's hard to explain.

Also - another point, our solar system is part of a wider universe, which may also be part of a still wider set of universes, for all we know. Using astrology's principles, there'd be alignments and aspects made to our Ages from others which could modify meaning - the macrocosm of the microcosm?

I do agree that what has gone on on Earth since the Industrial Revolution seems to be classic Aquarius/Uranus stuff....invention, discovery etc.
Then again, Saturn was Aquarius's traditional ruler, and sure enough there's been a lot of Saturnian stuff going on too.

The more I ponder on this, the more doubtful I become about the value of any astronomically calculated Age. Observation of history and of events has to be our best means of calculation. We have to keep in mind, too, that Ages do not exclusively reflect what goes on in the USA or Europe - but, in varying ways, across the entire planet.


BLOGGER IS HAVING PROBLEMS WITH THE COMMENT FACILITY AT PRESENT - IF A COMMENT AND/OR MY REPLY DOESN'T SHOW ON THE BLOG, THIS IS THE REASON. I'm receiving email notification of comments but they do not appear on the blog at the moment, hope they will, eventually. The fault has been reported.

Astrologers' Words of Wisdom

Words of wisdom from Robert Hand, one of today's most highly respected astrologers, from his book Essays on Astrology (published 1982). The following brief quote closes essay number 13, and the book. The essay is titled The Age and Constellation of Pisces.

We have masses of people in both the Islamic and Christian world who have reverted to the oldest, least rational and probably least conscious form of religious expression that their religions have to offer. They do so out of a sense that the new order has undermined basic human values that they hold important. And they are right. But at the same time they unleash forces of aggression, intolerance and inhumanity as they seek to preserve an aspect of their humanity from new forces............

We need a new way of looking at the world that trancends the limitations of the entire Piscean age, not merely the latest part of it. It must go beyond Good and Evil, beyond the limited idea of history and beyond the terrible split between Humanity and Nature. The goals must be consciousness and love. The first allows us to see what truly is and the second allows us to embrace it joyfully. If we have nearly nine hundred years of the era of the west fish (Pisces) to go through before we completely reach the Age of Aquarius, then we have nothing better to do than to infuse history with love and consciousness.