Here comes another one.

And check out some of my friend Alexis’s astrological predictions here. She called this one.
She’s a very talented super Sagittarius predictive astrologer.

Coronavirus just recently had a birthday, roughly November 4th, as November 4, 2019 was when scientists thought there was less than one infected person. Thirteen days later, there were four diagnosed cases:

…but this sounds like it could be a military coupe or perhaps a people’s revolution, right?

But no. It was a virus, a not-quite-living thing that gives not one fuck about any of the things we’re concerned with. It invades hosts. It mutates. It continues to do so. It has no plan, no forethought, no strategy – it’s not an army, or a leader, but rather quite the Scorpio Sun, working in silence in the background until one day – bam! Uranus in Taurus is there to make people know that oh yes, this fucker put down roots and he’s claiming squatter’s rights…but I guess you finally allow yourself to see that he’s been there all along, or rather, the situation was always there, just waiting for something to take advantage of it, and now it did, and now you’re acting like it wasn’t foreseeable, but Scorpio Sun is telling you that no, on the other hand, this is just the other shoe dropping.

Happy Birthday, Omicron…

We’re now at letter #15 of the Greek alphabet, which only has 24 letters, which means at this rate, we’re going to have to start coming up with new names for later variants.

If I had times, I could create charts with houses, which means I could really do a much more precise prediction. But what I’m wondering as of today is if omicron’s power isn’t so much in it’s impact on the body, the way that delta’s is, but it’s impact on the society itself, as in the collective. This is not to say that it’s not as bad as it could be — as of today, we don’t actually know how bad this virus is for all people, those with antibodies and those without, but on the institutions and groups of people. So, instead of like 1 in 10 people getting super sick, 1 in 2 get a little, but they just keep getting sick over and over again because they can’t develop antibodies to a relatively mild illness because everyone has the damn illness, and the faster it spreads, the faster it mutates, like a cold that goes around, and around, and around, wearing down (Saturn) their defenses until, oh shit, here comes delta ready to take advantage of a weakened state. As I’ve written before, Saturn is selective, and it decides who is part of the collective and who is not. Mercury conjunct Mars is a lot of little powerful things that are sneaky (Scorpio), not so much as big an impact as the Sun, but tenacious as fuck nevertheless.

Comparing the charts, it’s interesting to see how the Moon and Saturn have switched places. In the original pandemic chart, the Moon was at the apex of the T-square, and the Moon indicates the masses, the people themselves in a mundane chart. Here, all the energy of the T-square is on the people, and at the time, all the people were vulnerable, and the people with their minds on what is good for the collective (Aquarius) and who acted that way were not only the most safe (Moon), but most able to keep those around them safe. Those most insistent on their freedom (also, unfortunately, the Moon in Aquarius) are the least safe and make those around them less safe. At the time of COVID 1.0, Saturn was conjunct Pluto in Capricorn, meaning restriction causing complete change, consolidation of and/or loss of power, depending on how much power you have already — remember that Saturn withholds and Pluto creates extremes and absolute changes, so together, you’re not going to have the kinds of opportunities or merit-based rewards that we’re accustomed to thinking we deserve in consumerist societies. Viruses don’t care about socioeconomic class and neither do gene expression (to a certain extent), but one’s standing does tell how one will spend the pandemic. They move from body to body, depositing proteins and picking up proteins — the very beginnings of pandemics tend to be great equalizers, no? Then, as we establish ourselves into the new normal, we start to see the vast difference between who is safe and who is not.

But for omicron, discriminating and selective Saturn moves to the apex while the Moon is conjunct Pluto this time. Perhaps it is the absolute actions and attitudes of the masses that will make the difference, and this time fewer (Saturn) people or perhaps, specific groups of people who are categorically deprived (old people, poor people, people who live geographically far from resources, people of color, etc.) are going to bear the brunt of this while the masses act surrender (Pluto) or hold on even if letting go means living to see another day (also Pluto) and obsess over their various fears, which are also polarizing.

Pluto is symbolic of immunizations, by the way. The 8th house is one’s immunity, Scorpio is the natural ruler of the 8th house, and Pluto rules Scorpio. Planets in the 8th house can indicate one’s natural or acquired immunity to certain diseases. Pluto, however, is symbolic of vaccination.

So what this could mean is that COVID, like other diseases that haven’t been wiped out but have been pushed to further-flung corners of the world, won’t be eradicated, but will be pushed out of certain places by the actions of those who surrender (vaccinated) to protect those who will not (unvaccinated), but not actually eradicated. Polio is actually not eradicated, and neither is the bubonic plague or leprosy. These diseases still exist, but just not all over the place. I don’t think that’s going to matter; in the public consciousness, there will be two narratives from two different camps: 1) the people who vaccinated, who wore masks, who socially distanced, who “believed” the science (and if science is a belief, right?), and acted accordingly to save the world, and 2) the people who did not do any or all of these things, who decided to wait it out and do what they felt was right was for them, and look – it worked, because COVID resolved itself, or at least to the point where it’s not an everyday problem.

Saturn in Aquarius is at the apex here, and Saturn is deeply held convictions as opposed to fears, which is the Moon, and deeply held convictions can be formed without any direct experience or natural imperative, whereas fears actually develop to keep us safe from either things that are universally bad for us (like falling off a cliff) or things we have experienced and learned are bad (like putting your hand on a hot stove or trying to pet a boa constrictor). On the other hand, you don’t need experience or instinct to have convictions. For example, Saturn is symbolic of religious dogma, because you need not experience the events of the Gospels to believe they are true, nor do you have to witness or be the recipient of a miracle to believe that Yahweh does them if you pray to him, nor do you have to experience having an abortion and being sent to Hell for all eternity to have the deeply held conviction that Yahweh cares more about fetuses than he does living women, but only when he doesn’t spontaneously abort them himself, and only before they are born, after which they better not need anything from him or dare try to take his guns away or otherwise try tell him how to live. But you can tell the difference here: it was fear ruling the beginning of the pandemic, and that makes sense, but now it’s convictions and perhaps even exhaustion, and neither of those things need empirical evidence to exist. A weird thing for an astrologer to say, right? But if you look at the reasons why even some people are seemingly perfectly happy to blindly walk into what is, to many of us, an obviously avoidable death, it’s the power of fear and not convictions.

Having Rick die in front of me has made me fearful of COVID-19 because I know what it can do: you might get a little sick. You might get very sick. You might be on a respirator. You might simply go into cardiac arrest and die, too. When you see the sudden death and then you endure the aftermath in quarantine, it makes you afraid. However, no matter how much I might tell the story, I can’t make others share in my fear unless they are similarly situated to Rick in some way.

However, I have a conviction that we are all part of One, that separation is an illusion and that we are our brother’s keepers, and this is something I can share and convince others of — if we are truly so different, why is every astrological chart composed of the very same things, just in it’s own arrangement? Why are our bodies made of the same elements as the stars in the universe, and why is my DNA almost completely identical to every other human on the planet? If I am so separate from others, how come I can read their astrological charts and know them before I meet them? To be unique doesn’t not mean to be separate, however. To be distinct, to be different, does not mean to be autonomous.

I get all my vaccines because I have a hyperactive immune system, so even if I have caught a virus, I probably wouldn’t know it. Between Rick and I at the beginning of the pandemic, I was the one leaving the house, but he was the one who died, so I likely brought it home, but I didn’t have a single symptom the entire time, and I don’t think I’ve even so much as have had a cold or flu since 2015.

So, having Rick die in front of me also fortified my conviction that I am my brother’s keeper, because I can just as easily spread disease and not know it, so I have a duty to do everything I can to make sure I don’t, because I can only social distance so much. I mean, I still have to work with the public to some extent. I also know that if say, I got very sick, I have to deal with this alone because for the most part, I’m still pretty much alone in Chicago, so I’m going to have to be well enough to call my own ambulance if needed.

On the other hand, people with a strong conviction that the worse loss is that of individual freedom have unshakeable beliefs that the real issue isn’t refusal to vaccinate, or to wear a mask, it’s the fear instilled in people, and that fear is without cause because 1) they personally are fine as are most people they know, and 2) they personally should be trusted to choose what’s best for themselves and act accordingly, and everyone else should have this freedom because once the virus is gone, the loss of freedom will remain, and 3) most of the people who got very sick or died are the obese, the sick, the weak, and the elderly, so why should healthy people be forced to do what the at-risk groups need to be doing?

And there is no meeting in the middle here, so in the meantime, the virus continues to do as the virus does because it respects no conviction, and it hears no voice.

So, I think the real test as to the persistence of disease is Neptune in Pisces, that quiet, dark horse that’s been galloping along for about a decade, trining the Sun each birthday, as if to say “hey baby, here’s a cloak for you to hide under.” Because trine =/= good; trine = easy, and Neptune quietly made it easier for COVID to be born and to mutate, because Neptune is the ineffable, the uncountable, the vast spread of the unseen and unknown, and it likes to be in Pisces during major world crises in which it doesn’t really matter who you are to other human beings because it’s all going to get dissolved back to oneness. While everyone is busy fighting COVID exhaustion, fighting over how to prevent illness and death, and fighting over what duty we owe each other, the virus is just doing it’s own thing, the way the fog does its own thing regardless of how loud the foghorn sounds – after all, the horn does not blow for the fog’s benefit, but for those who will find themselves trapped in it if they don’t heed the call.

But Neptune has been in Pisces since what, 2012, right? As if Neptune really begins anything…the tide only rises and recedes because the ocean is already there, and the fog only comes and goes because the condensation is already there. Coronaviruses have been with us for all time – the common cold is a type of coronavirus. Most illnesses that we know of have been with us in some form before. SARS was around in 2002, MERS in 2012, and so on, but COVID is much more easily transmitted, and becomes even more so as time goes on, to the point where Neptune sits squarely in the middle of Pisces, sextiling the Jupiter/Saturn/Pluto stellium in Capricorn, and wouldn’t you know that with a little effort, it took over the world, or in the case of Neptune, a little conscious negligence. Neptune stays in Pisces until 2026, and I think that’s about how long it’s going to take before COVID is really under control, or at least, pushed to the far corners of the earth so people stop caring about it. It may even take that long to convince enough of the surviving to get vaccinated, especially if omicron is the beginning of mutations that cause permanent (Saturn) damage and chronic problems for survivors as opposed to sudden and mass deaths (Moon), because you know, it’s not the number of people who died from polio that scared people into getting vaccines for not just polio but everything else, because dead people just kind of disappear if you’re not the one who has to watch them die, it was the lives of the crippled survivors with withered legs and those forced to live out their lives in iron lungs that did it I think. I think it’s the idea of having to live life permanently disabled that did it because we can perceive of that suffering, and while convictions won’t necessarily save us from imminent death, they can save us from unavoidable disability – chronic disability and weakness being a very Piscean sort of thing. We know of some of the long term effects – organ damage to the lungs, heart, and brain particularly, the formation of blood clots, nerve inflammation, and never damage.

Overall, I do think that omicron will be an example of “less is more,” but I’m still not sure how – will it be death by a thousand paper cuts, or will it be another polio, devastating to a few, but really, really devastating when it happens?

Either way, I’m glad I got my booster. I’m still wearing a mask, still socially distancing, and still looking forward to a winter of austerity (Saturn) in time for inflation (Moon conjunct Pluto).