This week’s question comes from Rossa in the U.K.:
Do either of you ladies have any insight into what effect the new Comet Lulin will be having astrologically during the next month? I’ve read that it is currently travelling through Scorpio and Libra towards Leo and will be at its brightest and visible to the naked eye on Feb 24. With an eclipse coming up in Leo on February 9, I wondered if there was any connection?There’s some info on it here: Techastronomy Article on Comet Lulin
Neith’s response:
Thankfully, Rossa, Pat has done more research in this area and on Comet Lulin in particular, because I admit to knowing little to nothing about the effects of comets. Traditionally they were considered malefic and harbingers of doom, but whether that is true or not may be a matter of perspective because human beings are very good at justifying whatever it is they wish to believe.
That said, this is an excellent opportunity to gather information about the effects of this particular comet over the next month. If those people with key planets or chart angles at 19-20 degrees Virgo are affected, please let us know. Perhaps the comet will amplify Saturn’s impact by transit, and if that is the case we will likely see greater rigidity and sticking with the status quo out of fear.
Good question, Rossa! Thanks for bringing this celestial event to our attention.
Pat’s response:
Rossa, first of all I want to thank you for this great question! Because it’s not visible with the naked eye, Comet Lulin hasn’t been in the news headlines, and with everything else going on in my life, it wasn’t even on my radar screen. As the old saying goes, “out of sight, out of mind.” I just love it when our readers alert us to things like this. This is the whole point of having not just a website, but a real community.
With my back injury, I can’t sit for long at the computer, but I’ve been researching this oddity little by little over the past week, ever since your question came in. Tseka also sent me some links to get me up to speed on the basics. All I can say is that this thing is bizarre, and I believe it is a wildcard that may invalidate any predictions based on known astrological patterns. Could that apply to individual charts? I think it might.
For example, we’ve just had the second pass in the Saturn-Uranus opposition. Well, Lulin will conjoin Saturn on February 24, the day before it reaches its closest point to Earth and when it also may be visible to the naked eye. With new technologies discovered over the past decade or so, astrophysicists are learning more and more about phenomena such as comets, and they now know that comets carry a powerful electromagnetic charge. How could that energy not affect planetary transits, especially considering that Lulin is moving very close to the ecliptic, the path that the planets appear to take around the Earth.
What’s more, Lulin is moving backwards, and so I am looking for clues that it may be somehow “undoing” the expected effects of certain planetary transits or perhaps causing them to manifest exactly opposite of how we might predict. This is just conjecture on my part, and there won’t be any way to know for sure until enough time has passed. According to some astrologers, the effects of comets aren’t noticeable until the Sun or Mars crosses the point of perihelion (the comet’s closest point to the Sun). Lulin was at perihelion on January 10 at about 18 degrees Scorpio by my calculations, so we may not know more until November.
By the way, note that when astronomers talk about a planet or, in this case, comet, being in a certain constellation, its position is slightly different according to the calculations of Western tropical astrology. It has to do with precession of the equinoxes, which is too complicated to get into here. But you’ll notice, if you look at star charts, that Saturn currently appears in late Leo, and that’s where the conjunction will take place on Feb. 24. For our purposes, the conjunction occurs at 19 degrees Virgo.
I am slowly working on an article on Lulin for my personal blog, The Pisces Chronicles, and hope to have it up in a few days. It will depend on how my back is doing. In the meantime, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone for the birthday and get-well wishes. Due to time and energy constraints, I haven’t been able to respond, but I want you to know that all of your good thoughts mean a lot to me and I’m sure they are contributing to my healing.
Much love and many blessings to all…
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Thanks for these insights on Comet Lulin, Pat. The “only” impact this has in my little household is that my 84 yr old father is having his Uranus return at 20 Pisces. In keeping with the Saturn opposite Uranus transit, he’s been having a rough time of it–so if Lulin does reverse the expected status quo, I’ll be happy for my dad.
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The Astronomy Picture of the Day has a photo of Lulin and an astronomer’s explanation of the photo in today’s edition (February 7, 2009). If you look after that date, make sure you click the left arrow to go back to the date.
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
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If this comt is going to reverse astrological aspects on the new moon we have Sun opposing Moon, Pluto; moon linked with Saturn but opposing Uranus, Mercury opposing jupiter and Neptune, Venus opposing Mars and Jupiter, Mars opposing Jupiter, Neptune and the rising sign, Saturn linked with Uranus, Uranus linked with rising sign, Pluto linked to rising sign, Neptune opposing rising sign.
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Joe, that APOD is awesome! Thanks for the link. Everyone check it out.
Matt, welcome and thank you for your two comments. I will answer the other one (on the weekly forecast) in a minute. For now, let me say that I meant that Lulin might change the typically expected behavior of planets it comes in contact with. So, for example, when it conjoins Saturn on February 24, it MIGHT create some kind of a disturbance in which Saturn temporary stops holding back the rebellious energies of Uranus, which it appears to have been doing over the past several months. I did not mean to say I thought it would reverse all aspects at once.
This is just a guess on my part, but we’ve never had a comet like this before in human history, so unfortunately we are not going to know anything until enough time has passed. If it’s any consolation, I feel uneasy, too, but I think that’s just natural when dealing with such a big unknown.
OK, now I will go respond to your other comment!
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Another option about my dream is a meteor ( Ceres or Chiron ) opposing the moon…Cers turns direct on April 12…Chiron is in Aquarius and Ceres in Virgo…There is a bad aspect of Pluto on April 5…
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There are also rumors circulating about Iran, Matt, which may not be rumors come May. And I still see more news about the US military– other than the emergency camps– that’s not going to be so pleasant for us. At the same time, there’s Mount Redoubt, a volcano in Seattle that continues to appear “restless” and can erupt at any moment– volcanic eruptions do cause shifts within our planet.
I don’t know about a meteor. But I wonder why comet Lulin hasn’t been mentioned on major news networks. Perhaps its passing will be announced closer to the actual date?
Overall, nothing to be afraid of, Matt. The best that we can do is share our experiences and visions with others, and just do the best we can while we’re on this planet. If you can say to yourself that you’d leave the world in a happy state, tomorrow, you’re on the right track.
Regardless of what comes, though, sometimes it takes a disaster to make things right again. Hate to say it. But sometimes compassion can only come from some in the midst of crisis. Maybe the worst, at the very core, contains a positive.
Stay in the “now”.
Cosmic hug to you– all of you.
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I know, compassion and cooperation usually actually comes right after a disaster that involves many people on the sam boat…I’m really informed about the bushfires in Australia, ruining those beautiful places…
Usually my dreams have simbols to unlock…They are not realistic, but I’m able to find the key issue…
And every single time someone I know is going to die I dream about it the same day, or I have a intution about it…I used to have a dream diary but I stopped when those dreams were reducing in number…Now it seems they are back…Sometimes I can hear me thinking in the dream and I can decide what I’m going to do in the dream in a sorta of way…They are lucid dream…I also saw me looking a scene from above…Knowing I was dreaming…
I was concerned about a terror attack in Usa and England, although I live in Italy, already in September and October 2008…
I know I have to think to the ” now “, I’m trying, but sometimes it’s tough…I’m a Pisces, so you can guess I’m often concerned about something…lol
I don’ tell about my dreams to my friends, but they know me as the ” guesser ” of the things to happen…
Waking- up from some of those dreams had been awful, given that I dreamt that one of my best friends lost his parents and brother and he was going to become my step-brother…I felt really awful about it…I also dreamt the same friends on a hospital bed, telling me what day he was going to die…
And I had so many dreams in which he was my new step-brother…
I can read magazines and reading what I write in the internet and in cellphone i some of my dreams…And when I wake up I’m sad becaus I was really interested in what I was reading…lol!
I had many dreams in which my mother was pregnant, but it never happened and I realised that for every time she was pregnant in my dreams, I was going to get a new friend…
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In my infancy I wrote a ton of stories about two sisters that were my immaginary friends…I was always telling myself I was gonna meet them when I would hav been seventeen…
Guess my surprise when in December 2007 I actually knew through the internet ( Myspace ) two sisters identical to my drawings…They are two of setuplets in Indiana, they are younger than me three years like those characters, and they have the same names! I wrote stories about those sisters’ family and I asked them names in their families…Every one I choosed for my characters was present in their family…
The immaginary town I discovered it actually exist with same names of the areas of the town in Curacao…
They were astonished like me when I told them about those things…
In those stories I married one of them…
The most extraordinary thing is that I will never know how those names came through my mind, I was a kid and I knew quite nothing about foreigners’ names…
Those sisters are now my friends on Facebook and one of them is the one I get along with the best…The same one of my stories…They also have the same behaviour of those two sisters…It’s just amazing every time I think about it!
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