The Divine Wow

Full moon over Anasazi ruins known as UWukoki in Wupatki National Monument, Arizona. Photo from nationalgeographic.com.
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By Pat Browning

The rock musical “Hair” ran on Broadway from 1968 to 1972 and played more than 1,800 performances. I saw the road show twice, once in San Francisco and once in Las Vegas. The novelty of naked people milling around onstage dimmed with time, but the music stayed with me …

“When the moon is in the Seventh House/ And Jupiter aligns with Mars/ Then peace will guide the planets/ And love will steer the stars/ This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius … “

Forty years later “Hair” is set to reopen on Broadway in March, we had an interesting alignment of planets on New Year’s Eve, a couple of astrologers hint at a rerun of the ‘60s, and this may or may not be the Age of Aquarius.

Just as 2008 was going out, Venus, a crescent moon, Jupiter and Mercury were in close proximity. According to a news story, you could draw an imaginary line from Venus and the moon, down through Jupiter and Mercury, and the line would point to where the sun set.

Nothing stirs our imagination like the moon. I don’t know what “house” the full moon of January 10 was in, but it was a Wolf Moon – so named by early Algonquin tribes for the wolf packs howling hungrily outside Indian villages.

As to the Age of Aquarius, you could spend a week just surfing the Internet for various interpretations of astrological ages. Astrologers, astronomers, seers, psychologists and philosophers have studied the progression of the planets since time began. About the only thing most “experts” agree on is that an astrological age lasts about 2,150 years. However, calculations as to the beginning of the Age of Aquarius vary wildly – from 1447 AD to 2060. It’s a subject for serious study, not a Saturday blog.

Of more immediate interest are the interpretations and comments from a couple of astrologers.

Astrologer Mary O’Gara of Albuquerque writes the monthly Starfire column for Futures Mystery Anthology Magazine (www.fmam.biz). Here’s an excerpt from her January forecast for early 2009:

(Quote)
East of the Mississippi, money may seem to disappear as quickly as it arrives–but at least cash does show up to fuel your vision and meet your emergencies along the road. West of the Mississippi, money flows from business, marketing, promotion; if you’ve got something (from a book to a widget) to sell, it’s time to get back out and talk to potential buyers.
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Large publishing companies may cut back because of the bottom line–and innovations will fill the gap. Look around your own industry and see what needs to be done, then find a way to meet the need.
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For a writer, that may mean writing more how-to articles. For travel writers, the focus may be on family travel by car again or other service articles rather than glamour pieces. But it could also be science fiction based on the new scientific questions about energy and planetary change.

Change, in other words, is inevitable. We may be less innocent about change than we were in the 60's, but we’re also more knowledgeable about its potential.
(End Quote)

Californian Rob Brezsny, who writes a syndicated column “Free Will Astrology,” believes that what’s written in the stars is more of a suggestion than a hard and fast rule.

In an interview with David Ian Miller, published in the San Francisco Chronicle (www.sfgate.com) Brezsny says: “I believe our imagination is our most important asset for creating the future. … Why not, then, create self-fulfilling prophecies that lead us in the direction of love, integrity, happiness and generosity?”

He also says:
(Quote)
I believe that we've got some pretty interesting changes ahead for us. It could go a couple of different ways, and I would not be so arrogant to say that I know which will prevail. There is a configuration for the next three years, starting in 2009 and really kicking in fully in 2010, and it involves Saturn, Uranus and Pluto. The last times those three planets occurred in tight configuration was the period between 1929 and 1932 and the period between 1964 and 1968.
(End Quote)

Something to ponder there. The year 1929 kicked off the Great Depression. The ‘60s were a time of great social upheaval. Like the interviewer and the interviewee, if I had a choice I’d take the ‘60s.

Brezsny has written a book -- Pronoia is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings – in which he urges people to come up with their own religions. He suggests possible names for the deity: Blooming HaHa, Whirl-Zap-Gush, Sublime Cackler.

Brezsny’s own choice: “I like to refer to that Supreme Intelligence, the one consciousness that pervades the universe, as The Divine Wow.”