SIGN LANGUAGE No.9

Small is Beautiful!

- Well, it is when you are born with a lot of Virgo wedded to an insatiable curiosity about the Multiverse! If you, dear reader, are a Leo, Piscean or Sag. please bear with me; there are microcosms within your majestic and ineffable Macrocosm worthy of exploration by us as patiently and meticulously as any forensic archaeologist. I promised you Dwads again, and Dwads you shall have, courtesy of the new Solar Fire.

This spring I had a sort of brain-storm, which left me utterly exhausted and fit only for Dr. Who and washing-up. Too many ideas hastily tried in Yves Robert’s wonderful  AstroPocket at once ended up as arcane scribbles on my Palm notepad and seemed destined to languish there in disorder for months. However, nearly all of them involved Dwads - so let’s see if we can use that link to pull some of them together. Eclipses figured twice, locational astrology turned up with solar arcs, the Q-chart showed up again (and then while revisiting synastry a completely new application of the Draconic turned all my relationships inside out!) All this will need more than one article, so where shall we start?
... First of all with an apology; most of the working data comes from my own life, because first of all you ‘try it on the dog’, and I don’t have to worry about accuracy. Early experiments in micro-astrology are all going on in the home lab!

Location, location, location...
I suppose it really began with the house-moves. Astrolocality is wonderful stuff, especially if you are an inveterate globe-trotter; but for intermittent fidgets about one smallish island it leaves something to be desired, as angularities and house positions change relatively little, so only one’s radial planetary lines have much to say. For example in moving from Swale to its anagram - Wales - I’ve shifted on a diagonal from one end of my natal UK Jupiter line to the other! We’re still near a 6-letter estuary starting with M and ending with Y; our next seaside town is still something-Bay, I still go to choir practice at 7h30 on Tuesday evenings in C/B (short for Colwyn Bay instead of CanterBury), we’re even more involved with local church life, we still have musicians next door. This has been my 11th locality move since birth near the Bournville chocolate factory (!)

Now, when you click the Vedic button in SF DeLuxe, all the ’amsas are there to choose from, and the Dwadasamsa is the very Dwad chart we want. Selecting it, you are then asked if you want to make a natal Vedic chart first, or go ahead with your ‘non-standard’ chart. Clicking ‘No’ will create the tropical dwad you wanted. Voila!

I did this with all the places I had lived in, and loads of others that I’d visited in the UK and overseas. This was really interesting, because of course your dwad angles change radically all over the globe, picking up dwad and radix planets as they go! So here I am in Llandudno for over three years now - and this has been the hardest place ever to find new work. My focus is constantly pulled back to the house and the garden; and yet spiritual and musical life here is just fine! I’m doing more photography than ever, and the BBC keep knocking at my door (Coventry to film for Songs of Praise next.) What’s going on? South Node on the MC, North Node at the IC, and Libra Neptune conjunct Pluto setting all in the relocated Dwad is what’s going on. (Fig 01)

In Ospringe (there with Gerard for 20 years) Mercury rises in Taurus opposite a setting Scorpio Moon, and Cancer Venus is at the IC. How settled can you get? Plenty of writing and consulting work got done, and the house was constantly full of  people. (Fig 02) Wherever I’ve been busiest, I’ve found the same Dwad alignments. It was much the same at Walderslade where I had classes going on and co-edited the AA Journal. Truro, about as far West as Kent is East, put that nicely busy Moon/Mercury up and down the Meridian - but there Dwad Mars  was on the 7th with radix Neptune, and friction in marriage No. 1 led to its dissolution. (Fig 03) Marriage No.2 was to a Blackburn lad (Gerard) - and lo! When my Dwad goes there it makes a snug Sun/MC conjunction, and Ceres, my new mother-in-law, rises! (Fig 04)

Overseas, Jupiter is bang on the MC all the way down the Nile, so it’s even tight in Aquarius in the Dwad; Egypt was the one place where adventure was unmarred by mishap, and the Sun shone on us for three whole weeks (Fig 5). By Jerusalem, the Dwad angles have moved on to mid-Pisces and late Taurus (square radix Nodes and Chiron), where the Moon and South Node embrace the 7th cusp and I was part of a group on a spiritually important journey (Fig 6). The Swiss Lake Maggiore I have visited twice. The first time I stayed with a photographer, widow of a well-known painter; the second time, our hotel was invaded by glamour and cameras filming Switzerland’s answer to Pop Idol! No surprise to find a double Neptune, then! ... rising in coelo, and right on the Dwad IC (Fig 7).  But a visit to relatives in Calgary was dreadfully fraught; there, where the relocated radix puts Mars on the 7th and South Node on the MC with Dwad Jupiter, we ended up with as many arguments as adventures, and even got embroiled in a late-night drag-race! Fun and performing often come with Jupiter - but so does religion. G and I were half-way through “Puff the Magic Dragon” ( dwad Pluto/MC/Descendant?... ) for the nephews’ local Junior School, when the purple face of a clergyman appeared round an invisible door, hissing, “Can’t you keep the noise down? I’m trying to conduct a funeral in here!!!” (Fig 8)

Love at First Sight
I got to wondering whether Dwads would also show up the dates of the house moves, and decided to try something new - Dwad Solar Arcs; twelve times the usual speed! Alas, SF6 will only convert radix charts to Dwads, so I went back to reliable old Herschel. You want a Direction converted? No problem. Out rolled the biwheels, SA to Radix; firstly for pre-move birthdays, and then the actual moving date. The resulting angularities were quite promising, and had me hunting for something more exciting. Falling in love should be good! The best chart I could think of (that again I know extremely well...) was the moment G first set eyes on yours truly, at 7 pm BST on April 26th 1977 in Sutton Valence, Kent, because he says it was instant; it took me the best part of a year - long story! (Sadly I can't show you the chart as I once could; Herschel has not been updated for Windows Vista and 7.)  The Dwad of the Solar Arc brings Moon and Pluto to his Ascendant with Saturn opposite (he wasn’t free yet), IC/MC to his Moon/Neptune, Venus and Mars eyeing each other across his Nodes, Jupiter and Neptune lined up with his Venus/Pluto, Uranus opposite Sun, and Desc to Uranus!!! I rest my case.

Unrolling more of these ideas will have to wait till next issue, where Eclipses, Daily progressions, and some riveting synastry come under the spotlight. But I mustn’t leave this without a quite useful update.

Pope Benedict Again...
Subscription to the Catholic Herald brought a welcome freebie - Joseph Ratzinger’s memoirs, “Milestones” which sheds a little more light on the new Pope’s birth-time. He writes, “I was born on Holy Saturday, April 16th 1927, in Marktl am Inn .... this was connected with the fact that I was baptized immediately on the morning of the day I was born with the water that had just been blessed. (At that time the solemn Easter Vigil was celebrated on the morning of Holy Saturday.) ... deep snow and teeth-chattering cold ... reigned on the day of my birth.”

One possible time would be at or near 10h20 am; the all-important Jupiter has just culminated in the 9th in 20° Pisces, and conjunct a late Pisces MC are asteroids Peter (the first Pope) and Ratzinger at Pisces 29° and 27° respectively. Rising in 21° Cancer is a papal asteroid, Papacosmas. Another half-degree, and the dwad Asc conjoins radix Jupiter. Also, on the day when Pope Benedict officially assumed full Papal responsibility, Saturn transited Cancer 21°. Pluto, meanwhile, had been squaring the late degrees of Pisces - and, as I write, hasn’t finished yet. And take a look at the Composite this makes with Vatican City - two brilliant conjunctions, of Leo Moon/Asc and Aries Jupiter/MC on Benedict’s Sun, are a powerful indication of personal religious leadership and the highest public profile. There is even a double Mars/Asc contact - C. Mars to the Pope’s speculative Asc, and the C. Asc/Moon touching the Vatican’s Mars. It looks most promising; only time will tell!

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Co-ordinates not in text:

Llandudno, UK - 53N19, 3W49
Ospringe, UK - 51N19, 0E51
Truro, UK - 50N16, 5W03
Luxor, Egypt - 25N41, 32E39
Jerusalem, Israel - 31N46, 35E14
Locarno, Switzerland - 46N10, 8E48
Calgary, Canada - 51N03, 114W05