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Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2005 HAPPY NEW YEAR! Today is the first day of the new Pagan year, everyone. To celebrate, MSNBC has run an AP article on witches in the Netherlands getting a tax break for their classes -- something that's not so revolutionary because I am sure there are plenty of Pagan teachers who hold classes and conferences in the United States whose business expenses are considered tax deductible, just like when the president of Exxon-Mobil goes out for a $2,500 dinner. http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/10/31/witchcraft.tax.ap/index.html I've received a number of responses to a comment in Monday's Scorpio Birthday Report about the summer of 1999. This was the summer when there occurred a grand cross and total solar eclipse in the fixed signs. Today, we have a New Moon and grand cross in the fixed signs -- described yesterday (see below, a couple of entries). A number of readers were stunned at the connection between then and now, and what a significant time in their lives that was. It was quite a moment, one of several "millennial" events that served either as a vibrational bridge to convey people into the future, where many went through enormous growth, change, or progress; or, alternately, as a point of enhanced and accelerated chaos for certain people in power, feeding their evil counterparts on the astral who thrive on pain on Earth. Summer '99 was a mixed bag. I became aware of the grand cross researching something called the Cassini Space Probe, which passed the Earth nearly simultaneously with the eclipse, bearing its cargo of 72 pounds of plutonium (a little nuclear battery called an RTG), bound for Saturn. This was in the summer of 1998, when I was traveling in southern Germany, writing a column called Planet Waves for Rob Brezsny's web page, and reading Esoteric Astrology for the first time. My report from that summer is here, called "Thinking of You on Judgment Day." http://www.planetwaves.net/thinking.html The summer of 1999 had quite a unique energy. Put it in context; it was six months after the unsuccessful impeachment of Bill Clinton, six months before Y2K. Let's visit, courtesy of PBS: Following the 11-minute vote, Chief Justice Rehnquist read the verdict.Note, the so-called Republicans (Karl Rove?) launched an impeachment and could not even get a simple majority in the Senate -- much less the 67 votes needed to actually remove him from office. Chaos is their name. These people are not about politics; they are about raising hell. Here's a visit to the summer of 1999, folk history-styled. Note, this is part four of a four part series, which is (probably) linked from the article, and in Google. This article is called, "Flashpoints: the Continuation of Burning Man." I still like it, as it covers a lot of ground and includes three pretty amazing stories, but now the Y2K intro seems a little long and boring. Maybe that's because I've read it 38 times. However, as a "period piece" (not a New Moon pun) Flashpoints includes this reminder: that summer, we were thinking about a looming virtual apocalypse wherein all the computers and street lights and the work of all the allegedly terrible programmers in Russia and the global power grid would simultaneously lose their minds when the year turned over to 1/1/00 and spazzed out all little computer chips hidden everywhere that would allegedly think it was New Year's Day 1900. Were it so. http://www.planetwaves.net/burning_flashpoints.html | ||||||
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