Shaphan

Mercury direct

Mercury has been retrograde in my eleventh house, which is my excuse for not having blogged recently.  Since last I wrote, I have been liberated from an abusive relationship of thirty-three years. Thanks to this post at Obsolete, I finally hit rock bottom and woke up from my state of denial.  In the early days of the relationship, in the early Seventies, it had lured me in with Jill Tweedie and James Cameron,and I had became hooked.  Lacking a strong sense of self, I gladly took on the identity of a Guardian reader.  But it has changed and so have I, and I should have left it long ago.

The Zoë Williams story was the final straw.  When I first read the Obsolete piece, I assumed he'd copied most of it from Private Eye, but I've since learned that the Eye only had a tiny paragraph on it, so hats off to Septicisle for digging up the, er, dirt and presenting it so clearly.  I felt sullied, having read it.  I half-expected Williams to resign or be sacked - if it had been the NYT, she would, for bringing the paper, its readers and her profession into disrepute - but then I remembered that this was the newspaper that had launched Operation Clark County, which had helped swing the '04 election to Cheney and Bush.  Its perpetrators, Alan Rusbridger and Ian Katz, not only did not resign, nor were sacked by the Scott Trust, but the latter got a promotion and the former got paid half a million quid last year, via a 14.7% salary increase and £175000 bonus, for turning the Guardian into a comic.  They are Zoë Williams' superiors,and given that she wouldn't going, I felt I had to.

The only things I really looked forward to in the Guardian were Doonesbury, which the aforementioned then-G2 editor Ian Katz tried to drop at the relaunch on the grounds that Guardian readers weren't clever enough to understand it, and which I can still read at Slate, and the Corrections' column, although it never corrected nearly as much as it should have.  I won't miss the daily, centrefold photograph, which symbolized for me the triumph of the image over the word ('In the beginning was the image, sayeth the Guardian'), turning the readers into voyeurs; the 'people' column, which was about celebrities' lives; the gambling-advice pages in the sports section; all of the G2 section, save for Doonesbury; Steve Bell; its relentless obsession with popular culture; et al.

So, now I'm a free man, liberated from the unbearable lightness of being a Guardian reader.  Thanks to Zoë Williams and to Obsolete for helping to facilitate this act of liberation.

p.s. This was the paragraph in Private Eye, appended to a story on Peter Hitchens.

P.S. Hitchens may not be the only hack to be a victim of cyber-mischief.  The entry on online encyclopedia Wikipedia for Guardian journalist Zoe Williams was recently amended, with the insertion of the phrases "highly regarded", "witty articles" and "critically acclaimed".  The user who made the revisions? One "Zoewilliams". [PE 1179: 7]

Astrology: The Star of Windsor

Okay, here's a sequence of unlikely hypotheticals.  Prince Charles worries himself into an early grave; Prince William has a fatal motorbike crash before he sires a legitimate heir; Harry gets killed in Iraq; and, to top it all, the next in line, Andrew, Duke of York, renounces his and his heirs rights to the throne.  So we would be left with King Edward and Queen Sophie (and the inevitable jokes about potatoes and chips off the old block).  Currently the Wessexes have one daughter, Lady Louise Windsor.  If they had no more children, or only other daughters were born, Louise would then be our future monarch.  While I would wish no harm upon Charles, William, Harry, etc., I'm excited by the prospect - though I'll probably not live to see it - of Lady Louise as head of state.

Lady Louise is, astrologically speaking, a very special person.  In fact, anyone born between 09:06 on November 8, and 01:11, November 9, 2003, shares with Louise an extraordinary horoscope.  Astrologers, at the time, and sometimes for some years in advance, had recognized the specialness of the day and had called it the Harmonic Concordance of 2003 (see here; here; here; here; etc.), a riff upon the so-called Harmonic Convergence of 1987. 

Here is Lady Louise's birthchart [click to enlarge]. 

What's special about it is a) in particular, the Grand Sextile, aka a Star of David, and b) that she was born under a full moon that, 106 minutes later, would become a total lunar eclipse.                                  

                                                                                                                                              In order to see the Grand Sextile more clearly, here is her chart [click to enlarge] with the aspects to Mercury, Venus, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto removed. 

I have well over a thousand charts and hers is the only one with a near-prefect Grand Sextile.  If she were male, some might believe she were a messianic figure; and any males born at roughly the same time would be likely, I'd have thought, to develop messianic complexes. 

How the chart will work out in her life is unknowable.  It could be that her life will be far too easy and she might never feel the need to strive to achieve anything - drugs and laziness might overcome her.  But, with the right opportunities, Lady Louise could have an extraordinarily positive impact upon Britain and the world. 

G W Bush's and Ehud Olmert's Horoscopes

This is George W Bush's birthchart. [CLICK to enlarge.]

All of his planets fall within 120° of each other, from 20°Gemini to 19°Libra.  Astrologers call this pattern a Bundle. 

My favourite astrology book says this of the Bundle:  An individual with such a planetary pattern is motivated by a narrow, but highly focused, purpose.  Such a person is usually able to get whatever he wants, though most often without awareness (absence of oppositions) of the value or destructiveness of actions taken in the process of realizing his desires [Michael R Meyer]. 

The other point to note is GWB's Sun-Sirius conjunction.  Another astrology book, by Ebertin-Hoffman, says:  Sirius in conjunction with the Sun and well placed in the cosmogram will be found to be the case with numerous important and famous personalities.  Possibly, the rise in station is made possible by protection from people of influence.  (Others in my database with Sun-Sirius conj. are James I of Scotland, Liebnitz, Garibaldi, President Calvin Coolidge, Hesse, Cocteau, Frida Kahlo, the current Dalai Lama and Amelie Mauresmo.)  The star Sirius (alpha Canis Major) is sometimes called the Dog Star, and gives its name to the Dogs Days of Summer, which we're in now.

And this is Ehud Olmert's partial horoscope - partial, because I lack his birth time.  So the chart begins with 0° Aries, there are no houses, and the position of his Moon is not exact.

All of his planets fall within 112° of each other, from 17° Gemini to 10° Libra.  That's an even tighter Bundle than George's.  (See above)

Olmert was born nine months and five days before Bush - the two babies were born but a pregnancy apart.  Yet their charts are spookily similar.  They overlap each other.  Their main differences are that Bush's is stronger, in terms of the aspects between the planets, whereas Olmert's strength is in the extraordinary pile-up of planets between 5° and 9° Libra (Mercury, Neptune, Sun, Jupiter, Chiron, respectively).

Note, too, Olmert's Mars-Sirius conjunction.  Which means that that Olmert's Mars, and Bush's Sun, are conjunct each other in a dual chart.

Here are Bush's and Olmert's charts superimposed upon one another, with GWB's as the inner circle. 

See how they coincide.  See the conjunctions between them (EO-GWB):  Uranus-Uranus; Mars-Sun;  Pluto-Mercury;  Venus-Mars;  and Mer/Nep/Sun/Jup/Chi-Neptune.  Some transits will affect both men in related ways.

It's almost as if the two were one.  Two world leaders in deep and fateful consort.

I don't what any or all of this means, if anything at all.  But I found the Sirian Sun(self)-Mars(war) conjunctions interesting (although I hope that Sirius and Syria are not connected).  And as Bundles are the rarest form of astrological pattern, and both of these men, the current US president and Israeli PM, have Bundles in exactly the same area of the chart, I felt it an oddity worth reporting.. 

[Charts created with ZET]

Quotes of the Day

L'affaire Clearstream is highly entertaining and perhaps not all it appears to be.  And it's generating some colourful quotes.  From the Daily Telegraph:

Mr Sarkozy is said to have told Mr Chirac that his accuser, once exposed, would "end up on a meat hook" and promised an ally this week:  "When I shoot, I shoot to kill, not to wound.  The end to this is close."

And this from the FT:

Underlining how the atmosphere has deteriorated, Jean-Louis Debré, head of the National Assembly and a close Chirac ally, said:  "Sarkozy has put a bullet in Villepin's head.  He wants to put a second one in straight away, to make sure he is dead."  [italics and added comma mine]

The French, you gotta love 'em.

P.S.  On an astrological note, M. de Villepin's horoscope did suggest that his fall from power might occur due to a forgery, and it looks as though that could happen.  His ninth-house Mercury/Sun conjunction in Scorpio is conjunct the fixed star Unukalhai (alpha Serpentis).  It's his Mercury that is almost exactly conjunct Unukalhai (0 deg, 07 min, 34 sec).  Vivian Robson, for Mercury/Unukalhai, gives: "Dishonourable, accused of forgery or theft of papers, ill-health, narrow escapes, danger of bites from poisonous animals."  Sarkozy could be the poisonous animal, non?

Benedict XVI's Birthchart's 'Bishop's Mitre'

Several weeks' ago, when it looked likely that Cardinal Ratzinger would succeed John Paul II, I cast the future-Benedict XVI's horoscope.  (I didn't then know his exact time of birth but was still able to glean some analyzable data.  Now, I am using the time 4.15am found at this site.)  Two things about his chart struck me as noteworthy in the circumstances.

Malachy malarkey

It's so weird the manner in which John Paul II's birth and death fulfilled the Prophecy of Malachy.  According to the prophecy, the motto for his pontificate was De labore Solis, which, according to the online Latin-English dictionaries I've tried when entering 'labore' and 'solis', means Of the Solar Eclipse.  Karol Wojtyla was born on the day of a partial solar eclipse (1920/05/20) and was buried on the day of a hybrid solar eclipse.  Solar eclipses can be total, annular, partial or hybrid, but they occur on average fewer than 2.4 times a year.  I make that about a one-in-23,522 chance of someone both emerging from the womb, and returning to the tomb, on days "de labore solis".  You just couldn't, as they say, make this stuff up...

As for Joseph Ratzinger taking the name Benedict, with its connotations to the Benedictines and thus to the Olivetans, to Monte Oliveto, to the Mount of Olives, and thus to the Olivet Discourse in Matthew 24, God help us.  If Malachy's prophecy pans out, the pope whose motto is Gloria Olivae, the Glory of the Olives, Benedict XVI, will be the last pope before all Hell breaks loose. Yikes.

Addenda to LRH horoscope

[See previous two entries]

LRH's birth place, day and time?

• The data I used was Tilden, Nebraska; 13 March, 1911; 02:01am.
• Of the sources I could find, all agreed that LRH was born in Tilden, NE.
• Most agreed on 13 May 1911 - but Russell Miller (Bare-Faced Messiah) gives March 11th.
• I got the 2:01am time from here and from Russell Miller.  However, in 2000 someone sent this message to alt.religion.scientology, which puts the birth time at 11.43am. 
• If LRH's time of birth was 11.43am, then his natal Sun would be only 0°12' from Markab. 

If anyone can help identify the correct time of LRH's birth, please leave a comment.  I would also love to know whether LRH ever mentioned astrology, or his own birthchart, in any of his own lectures, etc..  Did Jack Parsons practise astrology?  etc.

L Ron Hubbard's horoscope

Click image to enlarge.

See also: L Ron Hubbard's horoscope, the Marcabians and Markab

L Ron Hubbard's horoscope, the Marcabians and Markab

I recently cast a horoscope for the Indian Ocean earthquake/tsunami (using the ZET program), and was looking especially at the fixed stars.  I didn't learn much about the earthquake but did learn more about the fixed stars.  I also have a book by Elsbeth Ebertin that lists and interprets 73 of the stars, so I made sure that the ZET database included all of them for future reference.

Then, a couple of days ago, the WaPo had a piece on how Scientology had sent 'volunteer ministers' to southern India, Sri Lanka and Indonesia on tsunami relief, and I was reminded of their VMs' behaviour at Ground Zero in 2001.  So I started Googling to find the details of that story, and was soon knee-deep in Scientology's secrets.  I remembered that at Ground Zero the VMs had tried to prevent other, better-qualified personnel from helping the victims and rescue workers because their belief system told them that the 'psychs' (psychologists, psychiatrists, etc.) are their, and humanity's, greatest enemies.  Because Scientology is secretive about why that is, here's an ex-member's (slightly OTT) explanation:

Hubbard taught, and the Church of Scientology believes, that:

1. Psychiatry originated millions of years ago in an evil alien galactic empire, the Marcab Federation. That empire was ruled over by Lord Xenu. See www.xenu.net for more information about that.

2. The planet Earth is a prison planet which is operated and controlled by evil Marcabian psychiatrists who are located on the planet Mars.

3. The evil Marcabian psychiatrists operate a system of Implant Stations which are located on Mars and the planet Venus. Human beings have been implanted and programmed to return to these Implant Stations.upon each body death. Here they are implanted by the evil alien psychiatrists to forget their past life, then they are programmed to return to earth where they will take over a new baby body. The implants are induced by advanced electronics and humans have been implanted countless lifetimes by the evil alien psychiatrists. Once implanted and programmed the being is packaged in ice and is returned to earth by flying saucers and dumped in the pacific ocean. The being has been programmed to find its way to a new body.

4. The evil Marcabian psychiatrists maintain a telepathic control over the evil earthling psychiatrists.

5. The only way to escape this evil psychiatric imprisonment is through L. Ron Hubbard. Dr. Hubbard is Source... he is the one who made these awesome discoveries. He is the one who has worked out the Golden Technology to free Mankind from the evil psychiatrists and this evil cosmic enslavement. Dr. Hubbard's Golden Technology is only available from the Church of Scientology.

So the Marcabians are the bad guys.  The name Marcab (with a 'c') reminded me of the 72nd star in Ebertin's book - Markab, aka alpha Pegasi, in astrology a malefic star whose longitude currently is at 23°33' Pisces.  However, according to Scientological lore, the star Markab in Pegasus has nothing to do with the planet Marcab or the Marcabian Confederacy - rather, the planet Marcab orbits the star Mizar in the tail of the Big Dipper (Ursa Major).

So I decided to cast L Ron Hubbard's birthchart, as one does. Actually, I doubt it's been done too often before, for I can't find any mention of it on the web.  Unlike, say, mentions of GW Bush's horoscope, in which, as most commentators note, his chart's most notable feature may well be the close conjunction (0°27') between his Sun and the great star Sirius.

Guess which star is conjunct LRH's natal Sun?  Yup, his Sun is 0°36' from Markab.  Thus my suspicion - that Hubbard knew he was literally a Markabian before he revealed to his followers the existence of Marcab and the evil Marcabian Confederacy. 

So, would Hubbard have known about his natal Sun-Markab conjunction?  I can find no positive proof, but circumstantially it's likely he did know the details of his horoscope.  Prior to Scientology, Hubbard had steeped himself in the occult - his intellectual hero, Aleister Crowley, was, among much else, an astrologer.  His friend Jack Parsons would surely have learnt the simple calculations necessary - it isn't rocket science.  And, according to LRH's son:

"... Also I've got to complete this by saying that he thought of himself as the Beast 666 Incarnate."  Interviewer: "The devil?"  Ron Jr: "Yes. Aleister Crowley thought of himself as such.  And when Crowley died in 1947 my father then decided that he should wear the cloak of the beast; and become the most powerful being in the universe.

All in all, the circumstantial evidence strongly suggests Hubbard would have known his natal horoscope and thus about the Sun-Markab conjunction.  If so, it would be somehow typical of Hubbard that, whereas in his cosmology the Marcabians were the evildoers seeking to enslave all humanity, all the time he had secretly known that he was himself a Markabian by birth. 

See also: L Ron Hubbard's horoscope