Planet Waves BY ERIC FRANCIS COPPOLINO
Great American Eclipse: Looking Back, Looking Forward
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strology may be the most objective means of studying the world, since it’s inherently meaningless. Every experiment needs a control of some kind, and astrology, removed as it is from any known law of cause and effect, provides the perfect null value. The charts and other tools used by astrologers provide information about the timing of celestial events, but no information whatsoever about their relevance to mundane life, with the exception of information about the seasons changing (good for farming) and the lunar phases (good for hunting and for farming). We bring all the meaning astrology has, through our stories, myths, observations, speculation and the ability to “read” a chart, which is a different form of reading than reading a book. It’s still a form of literacy, though it uses entirely different capacities of the mind. So, in this sense, astrology is also the most subjective means of studying the world. We see what we see and assign meaning as a willful act. Keeping that in mind, I’m here today to evaluate what has happened in the wake of the Great American Eclipse of August 21, 2017. This was the first eclipse in US history to move from coast to coast, and where totality was over the American continent itself rather than over the ocean. In a video presentation that came out shortly before the event, astrologer Dale O’Brien gave the history of eclipses that have cast shadows over the United States, and described the timing of what happened in the months after they occurred (a Google search for “Eclipse Paths” and the author’s name will get you to the right video). To sum up Dale’s excellent research and presentation, there are always cascades of history-changing events after eclipses touch our country. However, they usually take slightly longer to manifest, around a month to six months. If you study old astrology textbooks, eclipses (like comets) have a terrible reputation, and are usually associated with pestilences and disasters. Leo eclipses in particular are associated with extreme weather patterns, and Leo itself is associated with flooding events. (Hurricane Floyd, the first of what I would 106 PLANET WAVES CHRONOGRAM 10/17
call the global warming hurricanes to arrive in the Northeast, happened right after an unusual Leo total solar eclipse. Hurricanes Rita and Katrina happened shortly after Saturn entered Leo in 2005.) It’s fair to say that this eclipse appears to have unleashed the furies. In just one month, the United States has experienced four overlapping record-breaking hurricanes, whether we’re talking about destruction, wind intensity, flooding or nifty tricks like making landfall three times. The infrastructure of entire islands was wiped off the map. Vast swaths of Florida and Texas were flooded, rearranged or otherwise destroyed. As of this writing, all of Puerto Rico is sitting in the dark, without electricity or sewerage service. Then there are the earthquakes in Mexico, with some rippling into the United States. Mexico is, in effect, part of the US, as our histories and populations are so intimately intertwined. During the post-eclipse phase, the Dreamers—young children who came to the United States as children, mostly from points south—have become a political football. As of this writing, rescuers are digging a tunnel under a collapsed school in an effort to rescue trapped students. Then there’s North Korea. During one of the epicenters of eclipse activity, during the September 3 through 5 phase, North Korea allegedly tested a hydrogen bomb—a monumental event in global history. Any country getting the H-bomb is a monumental event, and there has not been one in a while. This began the latest round of Trump threatening nuclear war, which culminated with his late September speech at the United Nations, threatening to totally destroy the country if it did not cooperate. We don’t really know what North Korea is offering because we are not privy to the communications. Additionally, President Trump has repeatedly been threatening to pull out of the nuclear deal that President Obama made with Iran, risking yet another escalation and more rigging of the world with atomic bombs. Trump seems not to understand the notion of deterrence. If you recall, around this time last