News from the Ensouled Universe
Off the Charts: A Stellar Newscast
'O Fortuna': how much of life is destined?
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'O Fortuna': how much of life is destined?

Plus, why Summer 2025 will indicate whether America makes or breaks it
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vol. 1 episode 9

‘The Wheel of Fortune’ by Alex Quezada on Unsplash

Greetings,

What’s the point of it all? Are we enslaved hamsters on a wheel going nowhere, or are we participants in and witnesses to a never-ending wave of cycles and patterns that turn like the seasons, whirling its majesty through and around us?

It’s a topic Elisabeth and I get into in this episode, musing how even when we think we’re in control, maybe we’re not, and when we think we’re acting of our own accord, we’re just fulfilling our destiny. Most of all, why astrology can be trusted to give us the keys to the ride, and a map for the journey, even if it’s a circular one.

Ironically, we kick off philosophizing with silliness that turns out to be utterly on point. If you’re a Cole Porter fan and know his song “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off”, and you’re familiar with this rousing ass-kicker by Carl Orff:

then you’ll get my stupid intro joke. But even if you’re not, what’s faaahscinating, as Elisabeth would say, is that without realizing it, in our goofiness, we allude to this early 20th Century German work, one of the classical Western canon’s greatest hits, that points to the very conversation we have about the nature of human existence.

Funny how that happens…these little synchronicities of life.

Carmina Burana’s opening piece, “O Fortuna, laments that no matter how hard the narrator tries to live his up and down, hierarchical life, that damned other paradigm, the one that features the Wheel of Life, just keeps pulling him under. I mean, what a crank. All he can see is that whatever he tries to build and hold on to disappears. He’s pretty bitter about it, too: “Fate, monstrous and empty, you whirling wheel, you are malevolent…” yada, yada. Lots of complaining. Here’s the full text if you want to get a load of all that tsuris.

But, as this fun video performance of the work shows by way of some spectacular special effects, structures of stone and steel do eventually collapse, even the cathedrals we have imbued over centuries with the ideals and beliefs we hold sacrosanct. It is inevitable because Nature, which includes the wheeling cosmos, is the ultimate paradigm, the one that will always supersede the straight up and down linear one.

The grousing over dashed aims, such as in “O Fortuna”, is the sound of self pity that arises when Saturn, god of structure, tradition, and karma (among many other areas of human experience) meets with Neptune, bringer of dreams and inspired visions, but also soggy, foggy, delusions.

Is it possible for these two visions of reality to exist and more to the point, function simultaneously instead of piteously? Well, one of these paradigms is currently falling down around our ears while the other one rolls on…that alone should tell us that we are the ones insisting on our limitations by trying to keep Saturnian things like corporations and governments “in line”. Maybe if we choose to accept the wheel as the true pattern of life instead of the line, then the line becomes more productive, a spoke instead of the point of it all. We do need structure, after all.

In this episode, we talk about how this dynamic is currently taking shape in the US, as Saturn and Neptune are unable to see each other from where they currently are traveling in the heavens, but how being blind to one another, they still each have a line of site to all the other celestial components that signal what goes in to making a society civil, or not.

How will this play out?

Well, lots of things have to happen between now and the summer of 2025, but Elisabeth in her inimitable way of clearly breaking down the technical stuff, explains why by then, we should have a pretty good idea as to whether the US will succeed in switching paradigms, or will commit itself to living, and now clearly dying, by the sword of Damocles we set up over all our heads when we insisted on building a nation predicated on the hierarchy of genocide and slavery.

After all, you can’t hold your place in a straight line unless you determine that some people don’t deserve to ever be ahead of you in that line. You’d have to kill and chain them back!

Will enough of us conclude the dream/delusion of specialness conferred by donning these Neptunian, shimmery robes embroidered with “entitled to be first” were woven from a fantastical betrayal, more than they were made of reality? How might the energy of that dream/delusion be repurposed if enough of us slip out of these robes and seek to try on something else?

At the very least, think of the summer of 2025 as a critical turning point.


We make a few predictions, too, including when I suggest that our generation’s Emmett Till moment, currently being called for by a lot of people across all sectors of society, is coming, probably as early as this weekend when Venus meets Uranus.

What would such a moment look like, and why will it be shocking? Elisabeth wants me to issue a trigger warning for how I go about telling you, but that annoyed me, so this is our compromise. Consider yourself warned. I think it’s well past time we get graphic if that is what it takes to rip down the curtain of secrecy that shrouds the priests of patriarchy, the pillars of the linear paradigm, the sickos who are just fine with our nation’s children being decimated.

However, although we recorded this before the Congressional hearings about the insurrection on January 6, 2021, I am writing these show notes after a night of fast and furious texting between myself and Elisabeth about the riveting and shocking (Uranus) testimony by female Capitol Hill Police Officer Caroline Edwards (Venus), the first police victim to testify. In graphic, disturbing detail, she told how she endured hours of hand-to-hand combat:

"There were officers on the ground, they were bleeding. They were throwing up. … I saw friends with blood all over their faces. I was slipping in people’s blood.

“When I fell behind that line … I can just remember my breath catching in my throat because what I saw was just a war scene,” Edwards said. “It was carnage. It was chaos.”


And we answer a listener’s question: why is Elisabeth so much gloomier about the future than I am? By way of explanation, Elisabeth offers a nifty Chinese proverb that when my husband overheard it as I was editing this podcast, he said it’s featured in the rather good and surprisingly humorous Tom Hanks’ movie, Charlie Wilson’s War. That movie gives some context to how a short-sighted decision not to remain in Afghanistan in the 80s paved the way for the Twin Towers to be brought down.

The moral of the story in both the movie and Elisabeth’s telling of it, being that if you can’t see how the good and bad always contour one another, you risk being ill-prepared for what is to come. Put another way, nothing’s over until it’s over.


girl covering her face with both hands
Photo by Caleb Woods on Unsplash

Two other interesting events of note that happened after we wrapped production of this podcast: actor and Uvalde, Tex., native, Matthew McConaughey’s impassioned speech in favor of no more weapons of war in our streets, and in which he asks about how do we prove we value what we say matters, yet another theme of this episode; and, a suicidal-homicidal man was arrested after he called authorities asking for help to prevent killing Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a bizarre story that fully illustrates every current transit Elisabeth spells out is happening now, including that between May 29 and today, June 10, the only exact aspects among the planets are ones that involve the Moon. That leaves lots of space between all the other kids in the cosmic sandbox. Will they start throwing sand in each other’s eyes?

Or, as the Moon is carrying the light of all the other celestial bodies to and from one another, will the she help them see one another more clearly, especially as they try to inform Saturn of what Neptune has to say, and vice versa…


If you’d like to learn more about the forecast that precipitated this podcast, including why Elisabeth is itching to share just what it is in McConaughey’s chart that she says makes it plainly clear that he’d be a rising star right about now, and that the right wing media would attack him, then please visit her website: graceastrology.com

For more about me, poke around this page here. You will get a good sense of why and how I do what I do. And of course, I encourage you to subscribe.

Meanwhile, I am looking up at the stars. I hope you are, too.

Peace,

Whitney (for Elisabeth, too)

Thank you for reading Ensouled: The Journal of Cultural Astronomy. This post is public so feel free to share it.

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News from the Ensouled Universe
Off the Charts: A Stellar Newscast
Two corporate media renegades flip the script on the Powers That Be, using their insider's knowledge and astrology to offer perspective and analyses on world events that corporate media can't – and won't – share with you. Often funny.