Spiritual Company Newsletter

By Steffan Vanel • Astrologer • Tarot  Reader

Author of: The Astrological Karma of the USA
And: Charles & Diana: The Inside Story:
An Astrological-Karmic View

Now on YouTube: The Astrological Karma of the USA and The New Presidency
New on YouTube!: Bridging Heaven & Earth Show #238

Coming to Ireland and England in September and October.

The Original Moonwalk and a Michael Jackson Rewrite

With all of the recent reflections on the 1969 landing of Apollo 11, and the first steps of a man on the Moon, I decided to take a look at the transits that were affecting the chart of the U.S. on that rather momentous year.

I also wanted to announce that I finally came to determine what, for me, is the correct birthtime for Michael Jackson. The new insights are so revealing that I decided to rewrite my previous article. I am not going to send it out to everyone, since many of you may be feeling a bit of Michael Jackson media overload. If you are interested it is posted on my website. Here is the link: http://www.spiritualcompany.com/displayFile.php?art=20090720.html

1969 was also the year of the first Woodstock Music Festival, which I am happy to say I attended. It was also the year of the Vietnam War Moratorium demonstrations. It was an intense year for the United States.

Well, that year Pluto was moving through our 9th House, house of philosophy, religion, travel, and foreign cultures. In the years prior to 1969, Pluto had been squaring the U.S. Mars in the 7th House of relationships. This was the intensification of the War in Vietnam.

In the month prior to the Lunar Landing, Pluto conjuncted the U.S. Neptune. This Neptune was, again, in the 9th House of travel and belief systems. On that day of July 20, 1969 our sense of the limits of the tangible, of where we could and couldn’t travel to, went through a Plutonian death/rebirth, with a Neptunian dissolving of limits and boundaries.

At the exact moment of the Landing there were no difficult aspects between any of the planets in the sky. I have almost never seen that, and I have examined a lot of maps of the heavens covering many, many years. That day was a day when the whole world could feel a sense of awe and oneness, to step away from our limiting concepts, and the conflicts those limiting concepts create.

On August 15th, 16th, and 17th of 1969, Pluto on our Neptune, Neptune ruling music and the altering of consciousness through drugs, was still operative and very much in evidence in the manifestation of the Woodstock Music Festival. As I said, I attended Woodstock. I actually went two weeks before it started.

I personally experienced Woodstock as an explosion of Aquarian universal love and brotherhood. I witnessed it as the small groups of hippies in every town on the East Coast coming together and amassing to nearly a half million. I was only 17 years old at the time, but I remember thinking “This is going to change the world. This power of love is what is really going to change the world. Kids from now on are going to become hippies, and drugs and music is going to do it!”

Another factor at play at the time was Uranus moving into a conjunction with the US Midheaven, entering our 10th House, opening us to being able to play a role in the world that was capable of embracing the unusual and different, sudden change, and freedom from old patterns that had out-lived their purpose.

That fall, intense Uranian squares were hitting our emotional Venus and our philosophical, beneficent Jupiter. Additionally, Neptune was squaring our Aquarian Moon. This Moon represents the Aquarian idealism of brotherhood and humanitarian equality which this country was founded upon in its birth. This Neptune square to our Moon was challenging our ability to maintain our faith in our capacity to really stand for humanitarian equality and brotherhood. The Neptune square to the Moon was exact on October 16, 1969. October 15 was the day of the National Vietnam Moratorium in Washington, DC. I also attended this historic event of nearly 500, 000 people. It was again, a coming together in unity and brotherhood, but with the knowledge that our coming together as doves would deepen our separation from the hawks in our nation.

The most poignant memory of that event for me was on the night before the march. I was part of a candlelight vigil. Everyone in a line was holding a lit candle and given the name of a soldier who had been killed in Vietnam. We then filed in front of the White House and yelled the name of that soldier at Richard Nixon in the White House. As far as you could see in the night darkness was a long line of lit candles, knowing that each one was a dead American in Vietnam.

Both the half a million at Woodstock, and the half a million in Washington that year had their flaws. Many of us baby boomers who were active in these 1960’s cultural phenomenon have Neptune square to Uranus in our Astrological Charts. I recognize this as a tendency to either be spiritual (Neptune) but with no liberating, political social engagement (Uranus). Or to be politically, radically engaged (Uranus), but with no truly overriding, ego-transcending spirituality. In those years there was a lot of polarization between those two groups, a polarization which one can also see today. When we heal and integrate these dichotomies, we can do great things, political engagement combined with spirituality, something akin to Gandhi.

The collective good vibes of Woodstock didn’t last long. The next big festival was the Rolling Stones at Altamont, California where someone was murdered. The Rolling Stones had tried to show how US/California cool they were by hiring the Hells Angels for security for the show and paying them with cases of beer. A very bad move. Here we saw the dark sides of Pluto (death), Neptune (drugs and alcohol), and Uranus (sudden erratic craziness).

Shortly after Altamont the most nefarious hippy of them all, Charles Manson, entered the collective psyche. For insight into Charles Manson you might want to read what I wrote about the sign of Scorpio in my article about Hillary Clinton.

1969 was an exciting, challenging time. Myself, I was interested to see what Astrological ‘exams’ were at play in that time period.

One can only wonder at what will happen to this great, intense, crazy nation of ours as we face the next wave of intense Astrological Exams coming our way over the next several years.

Sometimes, when things look ominous and fearsome, I like to quote the infamous Aleister Crowley who designed the Tarot cards that I use. After speaking of the Moon card as a kind of ‘Dark Night of the Soul’ or a ‘dark hour before the dawn’, he says something to the effect of: “But the best men, the true men, do not look at life in such terms at all. For they know that whatever terrors assail the reason of the mind. Whatever horrors excite the loathing of the heart. The answer is the same every step of the way, ‘How splendid is the adventure!’ “

Blessings,
Steffan Vanel

PS: If you would like to know what aspects of your own Astrological Curriculum are being triggered at this time, or how your ‘Tree of Life” looks now, or just some quick answers from the Tarot for difficult decisions, give me a call: (206)903-9538 or send an email: steffan5515@yahoo.com Peace. S.

Steffan’s Spiritual Company Newsletters and ‘Starwise’ Monthly Forecasts are available by email on an annual, sliding-scale donation basis; from $10 - $50 a year.

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— Steffan Vanel Archive —