Astrology for The New Age

A few days ago I was listening to a somewhat recent episode of Chris Brennan’s excellent The Astrology Podcast (a place where editor Ken Irving appeared some time ago in episode 173). In a more recent episode, Chris discusses books he recommends for new students of astrology. As I have not yet reached my fifth decade of astrology studies, I figured I still qualified as “new,” and I noticed that Chris advised that new students purchase an ephemeris. I decided to take his advice, and after having purchased one, noticed a fact for October 2022 that I immediately categorized as column-worthy: all the “outer planets” (a category in which for our purposes we will include Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, plus Chiron) are currently all retrograde!

“Wow!” said I (to myself, alas, as, with the pandemic still lurking about, I had put myself in semi-quarantine, noting as I did that during pandemical times, talking to oneself often proves necessary to preserve what remains of one’s so-called sanity), “that’s completely incredible” (as if something could be incredible, a matter I will leave to my language-wise readers). But after some study, I decided that the situation wasn’t as incredible as I’d imagined, that it