By Raphael
Dramatization is a useful way to study Astrology
For instance in part one of my serial…
The scene at the outskirts of the city is urgent. But why? Intense rays strobe through my window from headlights and roof mounts. They’re like a blistering glow that radiates from a welding torch. At night. It does the same to my eyes even in day time. I turn away toward the right window at the overpass. Still hungry. Should have taken the bagel along, I think. Server probably scooped it up by now. The world is turning and the constellations pass over the scene. They add their unique chemistry to the nature of things as they are. Every four minutes a new mathematical degree of the sign Leo comes over the horizon. Soon the sign will change and bring in a new current.
I muse how each sign change is like a door in time that opens and closes. From inside the F-150 those strobe lights meld into one huge dome-like flare. Five police interceptors, on Hwy 10, scramble to form a perimeter. We peer through the window at the spectacle. The interceptors undulate and weave out of randomness. The gather into a well-ordered perfectly practiced pattern of flashing blue light vehicles.
Like the real-time Leo Ascendant on Livingston’s horizon, the scene is one of scale. Dramatic. The planet Uranus is just over the vertical line of the local meridian. Its heading toward the western line. The setup is electrifying but odd. Something unusual is about to happen. The door in time, the sign change, is minutes away. Two sets of headlights face us in the F-150. And three face the open road. All five vehicles maintain about a 40-foot barrier, like the rounded shank of a horseshoe. The two SUV’s have us boxed in. The pattern of the interceptors, though, is strange. I hear lots of voice traffic over two-way radios. The kind I hear when operating my Cessna.
About 50 yards south, traffic from I-90 descends off ramp and once they pass over the cow grid. A few cops, standing several few yards from their away from their Fords, beckon traffic into the swirl of blue light. I watched the play of cops and traffic for several minutes. Moving about at my right, about a foot away, Special Agent Maxine Farley finger combs her hair into ordered arrangement. She then fixes the sunglasses over her head, the way they were when see intercepted me at the coffee house. “This op wasn’t authorized was it?” I said.
Max nodded, then removed the magazine from her G-19. “No,” she said, turning to Morris up front, then me, with no expression on her face. “I was acting on my own authority. Anything to be transferred out of Salt Lake City.”
I figured she’d worked in a field office, maybe on the left or right coast. A myth, maybe, says that FBI personnel who mess up a job could get sent to the field office in Utah. There they can sharpen their skills. Some think its punishment, others think it an opportunity to generalize their proficiency by working different departments. But Max wanted non of it. “Did you botch up a field op or something in New York?” Max looked surprised. Morris stirred a bit in his seat, trying to stay out of it. “Yes, when I was in Cybercrime. New York. It was an eight-month investigation that ended on a technicality.”
“I see,” I said. Max racked the slide. The live round popped into her right hand. She reinserted the magazine, lifted her pencil skirt to mid-thigh and holstered the firearm. Morris, a man in his early 40’s, short, stocky, knowledgeable and by the book, breathed a sigh. In a sea of glistering blue he turned around. “I’m sorry, Max, SAIC got wind of your plan, to crash Major General ____at Flathead and ordered me to keep my earpiece on.”
“You went dark on me,” Max said. Turning to me, she said, “I knew his schedule and I just figured that if I could get you to come to him, with useful information about the astrological patterns between the PRC and the U.S. I stood a good chance of being sent elsewhere, maybe back to New York.”
“Of all the questions you could have asked, because you know my file, you could have asked me about your intention and I would have told you not to, the tide was not with your plan, at least, the way you planned it.”
Max slid her sunnies over her eyes, because of the flashing lights. She asked, “What would you have told me?”
I pull my cell out and call up the event chart for 0916. I say, “The operation would not end up as planned. Nobody would be in their expected places.”
“Where do you see that?”
“The end result of any matter, is represented by the 4th House.” Max leans over to look at the tiny screen. Morris is curious and looks into the rearview mirror. In the din of light, traffic chatter gets louder. I hear a faint whirring sound.
“Scorpio rules it, Max says” I say, “A secret op is being executed, one that goes layers below your original plan. A superior intelligence group has, as you would say, highjacked it.
“So you say, nobody is going to be where they’re supposed to be.”
“Correct. And three other testimonies articulate this. One, Pluto, the primary ruler of Scorpio, is retrograde. Its in officious Capricorn. Saturn, the ruler of Capricorn, is also retrograde and Jupiter, the ruler of the whose these planets are in, is —”
“Retrograde! Max said.
“Routines!” I said, “can’t live without em, but nature demands skill in managing them. That is, to constantly readjust certain daily routines so they don’t become too routine. Taken for granted. Unconscious. The routine of the stars, daily brought into view by earth’s rotation, another routine, is to blame. Like the celestial bodies we humans follow routines of thinking, feeling and acting. Like taking the same way to and from work or depositing the day’s earnings in the bank at the bottom half of the same hour, without fail. Or buying flowers at the corner florist a few minutes after two, every second Friday. These routines provide ease because they’re predictable and reliable but others can approximate a schedule by them, learn to expect them, anticipate them, plan for them and worse, manage them. Today’s facts require people to oversee and execute certain routines strategically…tactically. To render them more conscious and less automatic. As our world turns, making conscious changes in our daily routine is a healthy practice. Or else. That was my motto as a 2nd Lieutenant in the NYPD. In an environment where routine procedures were almost daily reenacted, like a routine traffic stop or the routine of issuing a speeding ticket or a routine building sweep, me and my colleagues were conscious of the fact that there was really nothing routine about it. There was always space for the unexpected.”
One of my new routines of late, was a daily trip to the coffee house, near the southeast corner of the main drag and just a stone’s throw from the tracks. Was there every day at 0914. For 17 consecutive mornings. Same table. Same order. Same server. My routine required four pieces of lively red-leaf lettuce, two pieces on each half of a toasted bagel fresh from the oven; three thin slices of smoked salmon—judiciously peppered—capers and green onions. And rather than cream cheese, I went for two slices of pepper jack. My bagel was the apotheosis of all bagels… round and slightly tanned with a satin finish. It stood for the circle or cycle of my day, its mouth-watering fixins, expressed my day’s events, and its center typified the colossal potential of the vacuum of space. Indeed, I devoured my bagel universe, with its celestial currents and subsequent dissolutions, every day for more than a fortnight, My routine also expected some fragrant black coffee. Neat. Mysterious. I was in the stream of a new routine but was I without vigilant internal surveillance? Was I bereft of conscious oversight? Surrounded by four patrol vehicles and two badgeless SUV’s, at a chokepoint near the ramp to I-90, and at a forearm’s distance to FBI Special Agent Farley, holding a live Glock, I reflect on my routine and the endless possibilities in the center of my now half-finished bagel. Routines, can’t live without em.
I realized my error the moment Special Agent Farley arrived at the coffee house and took a seat across from me. She, her cohort Morris and others on up the chain had known my pattern. They charted it, kept an approximate time of it, expected it and then exploited the opportunity to alter its momentum it. Me plus two FBI special agents, inside a Ford Police Responder. Outside, we’re boxed in on Highway 10 between two other SUV’s. A spazzed out FBI Special Agent is just a foot away from me with her loaded Glock. Her expectations frustrated. The flow of events and their meanings are deep and complex things. I quickly ponder this fact while I sit with these agents inside the black F-150. Drivers and personnel of two unmarked vehicles, one fore and one aft, detain us on Highway 10. As an astrologer you learn to respect time’s flow. In other words, all moments of time are endowed with huge possibilities for something to happen, such as this sudden interference pattern, which lurked, unseen, just beneath the last couple of minutes but has now burst onto the screen of space. It has a name:
Uranus!
I said to Special Agent Farley about five minutes ago, that Uranus invites the unexpected, the unanticipated, in fact, it’s transiting overhead near Livingston’s meridian. To see a certain moment, like this one, with just its outer trappings normally conveyed to the eye, stripped, naked…now that’s a subtle thing for the mind to embrace. And yet astrology can lay bare, to a certain extent, that moment of time, and offer a clear lens to view its depths, its substance its essence. As an astrologer you keep in mind that each moment in the flow of time manifest special conditions. Emerson, in his essay: The Oversoul wrote that: There is a difference between one and another hour of life, in their authority and subsequent effect. This statement applies not only to hours, but minutes, even seconds of time. Does the horoscope capture these difference in time? It can, if you consider the horoscope as a map of intersecting currents.
Like three-level chess or a wave-particle, each planet can occupy an infinite array of positions. As an astrologer suddenly thrust into the field, you fall back on your training. Like how every moment is loaded with vast possibilities for intel…how every action is, in itself, an energetic signature and can be viewed as a focal point for terrestrial and celestial currents to converge.
For example, Saturn is historically biased with reference to anything that keeps something within bounds; vectors that check or curb action, as in those two unmarked vehicles a few yards from us on an access road; traffic stops and law enforcers. Three examples of Saturn’s energetic signature.
A government operation can go bad, if Saturn, the planet of government, is retrograde. And if Mercury, the ruler of operational communication, transport vehicles and the service roads they travel on, is also retrograde—impediments take form as faulty intelligence transfers, potential misinformation and delays. But if three other planets are also retrograde, then the operation, which began under these celestial conditions, may just fall apart.
I ponder these facts as more flashing lights brighter than the sun’s glare, come in from the north and south directions on Hwy 10, near the mouth of I-90. A choke point (Saturn) because of little room to move around. An astrologer in such conditions, if innocent of any wrong doing, may have an advantage, especially, if enough time was taken to consult an event chart for their current place and time, some five minutes earlier. They would note planets in angles, the sector the Moon is in, the sign on the local horizon, etc., to draw in enough useful information to begin to relate the chart to the context of any current crisis, such as: insubordination, by an agent, to his superior, who unholstered her sidearm and spring-loaded it, a few feet from me; the apparent strategic delay of a planned excursion flight to an airplane hangar in Flathead; and local, state, and federal vehicles converging on all sides of our vehicle at the choke point.
I conveyed information, now considered classified, relating to PRC and their influence on the U.S. by next year’s August of 2021—to an FBI intelligence officer, the same superior who is at my right holding her Glock, ready and set, in her left hand. There is no de-cocking option but providentially, the muzzle is pointed down, and her two-way radio is in her right hand.
I relate the event chart with what is taking place now, so I say to Max, “The meeting at the hanger at FCA is off, it’s being reconsidered.”
Staring at her radio, Max says, “No one’s transmitting…we’re in the dark…” she ceases to stare at her radio and looks at Morris the insubordinate agent, then me, “and how do you, Mr. Jones, know that?”
Max follows my pointed finger, at the cargo van a few yards ahead. “I don’t know but I suspect your Major-General is in that Savanna.”
Visually tense and worried, Morris said, “Ahmad, you’re not just a desk cop after all!” Turning off the engine, Morris turns to Max in the back seat. “Sorry ma’am. I was complying with direct orders—”
Max’s sunglasses swoosh off her head and dangle from her hair as she jerks forward. “From!…orders from who?”
“I’m not allowed to say ma’am.”
Max lifts her charged firearm, along with an atmosphere of poised destruction, into the car.
“Stop! calling me ma’am!”
“Okay, take it easy ma…ugh Special Agent Farley. While you were talking with Ahmad at the café,” Morris juts out his forefinger, “I was hailed through my dedicated earpiece, with the current call sign, from personnel in that van, and commanded to..to follow new orders, in case of a site change and and—”
“Stop! Enough!” Turning to me, then looking through the front, then rear windshield, Max took out her earpiece. She whispers. “I heard nothing in my ear, must be another frequency. So, Jones, you’re someone I trust, what’s going to happen to me, I mean to us, I mean, is my assignment hijacked?”
“Just a change of plan,” I whisper back.
“Did you notice a site change in a chart or—”
“I charted the time you introduced yourself and sat at my table. I had my first look at the chart when you went to Agent Morris with his Grande.”
Seeming to come back with spark, Max asks, “What did it say?”
“Well, in the context of what you told me at the café, the chart suggested a swift reorganization of the operation. I got that from Saturn, representing in this context, persons of rank, in Capricorn, the sign of corporate, government or military leaders, and posited in the last degree of the sign, meaning the ending or interruption of a previously proposed plan. Saturn was retrograde in the 6th House of civic, military and police personnel, in other words, service-minded people. Its retrograde condition augments my remark about delays.”
“Does it explain why we’re here?”
“Saturn co-rules the 7th House of open roads, while Uranus, which just passed the 10th House of persons like major-generals, is the more modern ruler of that house, because of Aquarius, the sign it naturally rules, on the 7th cusp. So, east Park, and even Highway 10 relate to this chart’s 7th House, and with Leo-Rising, the Sun was in the 11th House, the natural House of Uranus of sudden change and the unexpected, and Saturn, its natural co-ruler. With Uranus involved situations tend to be out of one’s control.” Max fidgeted in her seat; the breezy, fiery and self-assured demeanor that she wore at the café…was gone. I was again alerted to her charged firearm. There was something, another strata of activity, in a state of play. She betrayed trepidation about what I would say next, what the next few minutes would uncover. Her questions explained much to me. I became more convinced that she was…
“You meant to crash a strategy meeting at the hanger,” I said. And you thought that bringing me along would garner some needed accolade to justify your reassignment to, well let’s say, to New York or the Hoover building or —”
“Anything but Salt Lake City,” Max yelled.
“Max,” I whispered, “most special agents don’t consider SLC’s field office as some punishment… take the mag out before something dangerous happens, Max! you’ve gone rouge and those vehicles out there are for you.