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10 Tips For Learning Astrology
October 19, 2007 – 3:23 am | 62 Comments

So you want to learn about astrology? Not the generalized Sun-sign stuff that you find in newspapers and magazines, but serious astrology. The advanced type where you can actually determine specific information about a person’s life through the observation of the planets and other celestial phenomena. Here are some tips to help you get started.

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Home » astrological techniques and concepts

Locked Out and Hacked: Saturn, Mars and Websites

Posted by on May 11, 2012 at 10:33 pm8 Comments

Locked Out and Hacked: Saturn, Mars and WebsitesLast week I was preparing the Horoscopic Astrology Blog for a traffic spike due to an interview that Patrick Watson and I did with ABC News for the Political Astrology Blog.

I was trying to make sure that the blog could withstand a large increase in traffic, but I was also trying to beef up security, in order to try to avoid getting hacked since a lot of attention would be directed to the blog once the interview came out.

At one point during the course of the week I installed some new security software that was designed to provide better protection against people who are trying to guess the password in order to gain access to the website.  Things were going pretty well, and I was impressed with the way that the software was blocking some automated computers that were continuously trying to gain access to my site.

I was in the process of writing an article on the blog when I decided to save the draft and refresh the page.  Suddenly the page went blank, and in big bold letters it simply said something to the effect of “you have been blocked from accessing this website.”   I had been blocked.  From my own website.  After the initial panic subsided, I was able to infer that the security software that I had just installed earlier that day must have malfunctioned, and it had locked me out of the website completely.

Saturn conjunct the ascendantAt this point I started to scramble in order to figure out how to fix the problem, and for some reason I glanced at the astrology software program I use, Solar Fire, where I had the chart up for the current moment.

I noticed that Saturn was right on the ascendant, rising over the eastern horizon at the moment when I realized that I had been blocked from my website.   Oddly appropriate symbolism given Saturn’s conventional significations, which often have to do with rejecting and excluding things.  “Great,” I thought.

Eventually after contacting tech support and trying a few different things, I was able to figure out a way to get back into my website and disable the security software.  After everything settled down and I had figured out what went wrong and how to fix the problem, I decided to take a look at the chart for that moment again, for the sake of consistency.

Ascendant into ScorpioThe ascendant had just moved into Scorpio, so that the rising sign, and thus the first whole sign house, no longer had Saturn in it.  “Interesting…”

Now, it is not that I’ve never observed these types of real-time correlations before, but I just thought that this was a particularly vivid example of the way that the archetypal nature of the planets can sometimes manifest itself in very direct, concrete ways, sometimes in situations where you least expect it.

What is interesting is that if you pay close attention to transits in this way, you start to notice that these sorts of things are happening all the time.  Let me give another example.

A few days after the Saturn-ascendant debacle, I was looking through some of the pages on one of my other websites when I noticed a typo in one of the articles.  I decided to open it up and start editing the article so that I could fix the typo.  For some reason I opened up the html code in the editor and started reading through it when a specific word caught my eye.  Viagra.  After a few very brief moments of questioning why I wrote a section in the article discussing the use of Viagra by the second century astrologer Vettius Valens, I realized that my website had been hacked, and someone had inserted invisible ads and links for various products into several pages on my site.

Mars conjunct ascendantRemembering the security incident I had a few days earlier, I decided to cast a chart for that moment again — the moment when I realized that my website had been compromised and essentially vandalized.  I brought up the chart, and noted that this time it was Mars that was right on the ascendant.  Despite the situation, I couldn’t help but laugh, albeit very dryly.

Interestingly, I went back and checked what the chart looked like when I first noticed the typo which eventually led to me looking at the code and subsequently making the discovery that I had been hacked, and at that moment the ascendant had just moved into Virgo.

So the event which eventually led to the realization that my website had been compromised occurred as soon as the ascendant moved into Virgo, and then the actual discovery that the site had been hacked, as well as my subsequent realization of the extent of the intrusion, occurred while Mars was rising over the degree of the ascendant.

These are just a couple of examples of the types of correlations that you can sometimes see occurring when you pay attention to when certain planets hit the angles.  What was interesting about this for me was the fact that the basic astrological meaning associated with those two planets was displaying itself within a setting that is relatively new, yet the symbolism is still relatively straightforward.  Saturn hit the ascendant and I was locked out of my website.  Mars hit the ascendant and I realized the the site had been broken into.

Additionally, in the first instance the rising of Saturn correlated with the actual external circumstance of getting kicked out of my website, whereas in the second instance the rising of Mars correlated with my sudden awareness of the fact that the website had been hacked into at some point in the past, and not the actual event of the hacking itself, which it turned out had taken place weeks earlier.   This raises some interesting conceptual and philosophical issues, because on the one hand we see the astrology as being capable of correlating with an objective external event, and on the other hand we see it correlating with what was essentially my sudden awareness that an event of a certain type had taken place.

Finally, I wanted to write up these examples because it provides us with some inkling of the types of situations that astrologers will need to learn how to deal with and understand in the future, as society continues to become more and more focused on technology and computers.  The good news is that it shows that astrology is still applicable in these areas.  We have a lot of work to do in making empirical observations about the types of events and situations that certain planets correlate with when it comes to these new areas of human experience though.  The examples I’ve given above seem to show the underlying archetypal principles are still very much valid and relevant, but it is simply a matter of observing how they work in a new context.

The take-home lesson here is simply that when something significant happens in your life, try casting a chart for that moment, and see if there is anything that you can learn from it.  In doing so you may be able to help the astrological community to expand its understanding of some uncharted areas.

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About Chris Brennan

Chris is a practicing astrologer from Denver, Colorado, USA. He is the former President of the Association for Young Astrologers, as well as the former Research Director of the National Council for Geocosmic Research. He offers personal consultations and teaches online classes through his website at www.ChrisBrennanAstrologer.com.




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8 Comments »

  • Lorenzo dello Smerillo says:

    In the interests of data, empirical data collection, it would be useful to anyone who might so wish to follow up on your observations, to have the precise data of the two events you describe.

    I am assuming, perhaps symbolically with greater rashness than usual, however, that not every web-sight user was locked out of their own domain in the Denver area at the same time as you were. Nor was there a rolling effect across the geography.

    feliciter.

  • Chris Brennan says:

    The data is available by clicking on the pictures in the articles, which brings up the full chart.

  • Suzanne Pfitzner says:

    Yes, one would think that the transiting planets need to have ‘connection’ with ones natal chart to see any effect for that native. Do you have any planets/points on those early degrees of Virgo, Chris? Or square/opposing? And to the late degrees of Libra? No other correlations via rulership?

  • Chris Brennan says:

    I made a couple of observations last week when some of this was happening about how it seemed to connect the transiting planets to me at the time, although I didn’t include them in the article because I thought it would make it too complicated:

    1. I was in an Aquarius daily profection on the 30th, activating Saturn as the time-lord for the day, and I was in a Scorpio daily profection on the 3rd, thus activating Mars as the time-lord for the day.

    Both of these are just very brief 24 hour periods in which those planets become time-lords. This partially explains why these planets would be relevant to me on those particular dates rather than everyone in Denver. It also explains why those transits might be important to me on those specific dates, and not necessarily every day that Saturn or Mars hits the ascendant, or what have you.

    As an interesting side note, I noticed with the first transit that Saturn continued to be important when it reached other angles, and it wasn’t just the ascendant. Later on that night the developer of the security software released an update in order to fix the specific issue that resulted in me being locked out, and I noticed that when I pressed the button to start automatically installing the patch that Saturn was right on the degree of the MC. This might be explained by the fact that Saturn was still activated as the time-lord for the day. What it implies though is that when this happens it may be necessary to follow the exact hits to all of the angles.

    2. The second way that it tied into my chart is through sect. I was born during the day, so generally speaking Saturn transits aren’t as difficult for me, whereas Mars transits usually are. This is another way in which things may have gone differently for me when I experienced these correlations compared to, for example, someone who was born at night. With the first event where Saturn hit the ascendant what happened ended up being more of a brief scare, where I thought that something seriously problematic may have just happened with the website, but ultimately everything was ok. With the second event when Mars hit the ascendant something seriously bad actually did happen — my site had been compromised, and malicious code had been injected into it. I think that this relates back to the distinction between the way that people experience the events that correlate with these planets depending on whether they were born during the day or at night.

    There are a few other things that might be relevant, but those are the main two that I’ve taken into account at this point.

  • Kristina says:

    I often find it uncanny how literal transits can be if you’re paying attention. As far as planets on the angles, that’s something I hadnt thought to look at. Interesting. The connection of Mars in Virgo with the word ‘Viagra’ is really a bit humorous 🙂

  • joel mccoy says:

    first time visit to your website. what is much more poignant than the ascendent or mars at any ‘Aha!’ 0°virgo Asc. moment is the 0°fisches movement from 7H into 6house with Neptun hard on its heels but still in and lord of 7. That is when hidden public knowledge became felt subjective perception; nice picture! The feeling of loss anger and helplessness came when Neptun entered 6h.
    A cheap but ethically imperitive upgrade for all people who compute other persons personal data, (Astrologers, psych, medical), on computers connected to the web is a TPM (Trusted platform module) that plugs into the motherboard. TPM’s cost < 12. Euro retail here; they are certainly cheaper in the USA. Preserve the reputation of astrologers, upgrade your security with kit you can keep! They are becoming available for cellphones as well. You can't buy a friends trust back for $15.oo. Encrypt, encrypt, encrypt.

  • joel mccoy says:

    did you censor my second comment? Why?

  • Chris Brennan says:

    Because you posted them in the wrong article. If you want to comment on the 10 Tips For Learning Astrology article then post your comments in the comments section of that article, not this one.