The Navigator's Sign By Sign
 for July 1998
 
 By Eric Francis
 Copyright .c 1998, all rights reserved.
 
 ARIES (March 21- April 19) -- What could be the
 (allegedly) hardest things for an Aries to learn? How about
 patience. Discipline. Foresight. Completion. And true self-
 confidence. Well, congratulations, I have checked six
 different versions of your astrology, looked at twelve
 different Tarot decks, called five different 1-900 lines and
 visited my fortune teller in Asbury Park, and they all say
 the same thing: You got the picture, you have come
 through your cosmic initiation splendidly and have finally
 learned how to harness enough of your beautiful
 stupendous Marsy fire-power in a kind of a newly-created
 psychic furnace that can not only boil water and heat a
 home, but can also pull a train, run a factory and double as
 an electric tooth brush. As for the one major thing you've
 left undone and are feeling somewhat uneasy about, give
 that a chance to come around in its own time. There's no
 rush.
 
 TAURUS (April 20-May 20) -- Looking into your aura, I got
 an image of you floating in a tiny boat out on the ocean. It
 was dark and foggy and you had no idea where you
 actually were. Then, through the mists of the fog, a huge
 sailing vessel seemed to materialize behind you. There was
 no chance of a collision, but the experience of this
 immense, beautiful ship appearing was stunning, both on a
 poetic level and because you recognized that what you
 were seeing was the materialization of possibility. That
 ship, which may not even be aware of you, represents
 potential. It may be sailing to any port in the world, which
 means that any opportunity may arise from this one single
 momentous experience. Of course, you always have the
 choice to stay right where you are.
 
 GEMINI (May 21- June 20) -- I am writing this horoscope
 on a warm evening in a place called Oscar's Cafe in
 Freiburg, Germany. The place is packed and there are
 conversations all around me, and beautiful women are
 serving tall pints of beer as the free-spirited Sagittarius
 Full Moon rises over this ancient city. Now that His Royal
 Highness Saturn, who sometimes masquerades in a silly
 costume as the Lord of Stiffness, Conformity and Propriety,
 has exited the 11th house of your highest personal visions
 and your social circle, I would propose that this place or
 someplace like it would be the perfect setting for you to
 make some new friends and casually discuss just what you
 no longer wish to be doing with your life.
 
 CANCER (June 21- July 22) -- I am again working through
 an 800-page textbook called *Esoteric Astrology* by Alice
 Bailey, which for half a century has created confusion,
 controversy, hysteria and spontaneous enlightenment
 among the members of my profession. One of its teachings
 is quite conveniently applicable your life right now, so I
 will put it straight to work. Bailey says the planet Saturn is
 about opportunity. What an outrageous prospect! Most
 people want to kill Saturn. I bet Ronald Reagan (against the
 advice of his astrologer) aimed a Star Wars missile straight
 at it. Well, if you consider that Saturn represents
 opportunity, and that for you, Taurus, his new home,
 represents how much you get paid in your career, as well
 as what possibilities actually exist for you to share your
 greatest gifts with the rest of us, plus who you know and
 what you really tune into when the Great Rays are shining
 through your mind... need I say more?
 
 LEO (July 23 - Aug. 22) -- A complex planetary
 configuration associated with your sign caused me to stop
 and think deeply about the nature of your life and
 fortunes, twisting the lobes of my brain until it suddenly
 occurred to me that what the planets were saying is quite
 simple. You now have the karmically legal and very
 available opportunity to steal brilliant, inspired ideas from
 the eccentric, original people around you, light your
 passion and divine inspiration on theirs as innocently as
 you would stick an unlit match in a candle-flame, and then
 put whatever you learn to work in the world, building
 your power and solidifying your reputation for things at
 which you are the very best. You've done enough studying
 the theories and concepts in the library. The world is now
 your playground, and everyone is your playmate.
 
 VIRGO (Aug. 23- Sept. 22) -- I recently had dinner with a
 physicist and professor at the University of Hanover, which
 really is my idea of a good time, or one of them. He
 explained that science is very good at describing what
 happens, but not so good at explaining why it happens or
 what it means. That, he said, is the job of philosophers.
 "And astrologers," I said, explaining: Scientists find things
 out there, and astrologers figure out what they mean. But
 that can't be possible, he said if astrology is meaningless.
 So I gave him my theory that astrology works on the level
 of poetic understanding. You can't prove whether it's right
 or wrong, but that doesn't stop it from making a very big
 difference. This he could accept, and knew I had
 discovered some kind of occult key or perhaps a well-
 beaten path into the mind of rationality. Appeal to beauty.
 And, for some reason, then it dawned on me what I needed
 to say to you this month, something you can take with you
 for the years ahead: Remember, if it ain't friendly, it ain't
 God.
 
 LIBRA (Sept. 23- Oct. 22) -- There is no way to keep some
 things contained, you being one of them. It is possible to
 delay. It is possible to encounter strange obstacles. It's
 possible to have every person in your life suddenly turn
 into your mother, as if you were in some kind of psychic
 fun-house designed to make you face the things you
 dreaded the most, just so that you could learn how utterly
 meaningless they really are. It is possible to have
 everything appear to be a barrier in your way until you
 touch it and test it and give it a shove, and in doing this
 you find out that what looked like a brick wall is actually
 made of soft foam, and what looked like big boulders
 falling all over your path were really rubber blobs that
 you could kick out of the way. And then you find out, right
 around now, that the cement crypt you thought you'd been
 stuffed in for many, many moons turned out to be made of
 exact the same stuff.
 
 SCORPIO (Oct. 23- Nov. 22) -- At the moment Saturn, the
 Lord of Karma, entered your 7th house of marriage-like
 partnerships - also known as The Cosmic Mirror - there
 was a most spectacular display of planetary ebullience in
 your 8th house of orgasmic delights. I am not quite sure
 what that means, but I will do what any good astrologer
 does when faced with the unknown: stare at the chart for a
 while and take an educated guess. I have a hunch that
 there's some unresolved sexual guilt lingering in your
 energy field in what could otherwise be a long season of
 rip-roaring passion. And I suspect that this guilt originates
 with the most silly idea of possession in relationships. Hunt
 it down, clear it out and fling it down the cosmic garbage
 chute. You don't need to own anyone, they don't need to
 own you, and you don't need guilt. And please don't shake
 your head. I may not know what I'm talking about, but I'm
 a good guesser.
 
 SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 23- Dec. 21) -- There is an idiotic New
 Age teaching which says that in order to change our
 experiences in the world, we merely need to change our
 ideas about it. The trouble is, it works most of the time.
 One place it would be very good for you to start changing
 your ideas would be in at work. While you could always
 order in regularly from a good practical joke catalog, my
 deepest religious beliefs hold that pranking is a do-it-
 yourself matter. How about typing outrageous fake
 newspaper articles about your company and tacking them
 to the employee bulletin board? Or perhaps producing
 satires of corporate memos? Or faxing in a bizarre menu
 from the "new coffee shop" across the street? One gag a
 week will suffice. The modern office was made for
 partying, and you'll need to become a master of the game,
 because the work is coming on strong. If you're not having
 fun, there will be no point at all.
 
 CAPRICORN (Dec. 22- Jan. 19) -- The Lord of Limitation and
 Maturity, your esteemed ruler Saturn, has now entered
 your fifth house of boogeyboarding, hamming it up and
 getting laid. This can only mean one of two things: either
 you are destined to three years of being an utter bore, or
 that you must now take your fun very, very seriously. I
 suggest you make it a discipline on the level of yoga.
 Organize doing one thing just for fun every single day, and
 take a day off once a week with that beautiful Capricornian
 devotion of yours, just to celebrate. You must now pay off
 the karmic debt you accumulated during the past three
 years of very heavy emotional purging that is now, for the
 most part, over.
 
 AQUARIUS (Jan. 19- Feb. 18) -- If I were you, this is what I
 would be feeling. I would want to be getting into this
 heavy space of how deep things really are, but it would be
 hard because of how peculiar and mysterious things really
 are becoming. I would be very concerned about all my
 emotional baggage that I had hidden away over the years,
 and dread the thought of going down to the basement and
 dragging it upstairs to see what was there, only build up
 the gumption to do the job and then discover that I had
 taken care of it all last year. And why would I think I was
 subject to such strokes of cosmic good fortune? Because
 somehow, some way, I had really taken to heart those
 things I value the most in life, and realized that it makes
 everything else a whole lot easier. That is, if I were you.
 
 PISCES (Feb. 19- Mar. 20) -- Having survived what I
 thought were thirty months of money hell, I decided to
 investigate and see whether this was really true, for the
 sake of all my fellow Pisceans in the world. As it turns out,
 there were some difficult times, but I ate every day. Then
 there was the time that I didn't have adequate backing for
 the radio version of this column, which broadcast for 75
 weeks in Woodstock, NY, and my friend Jerry personally
 wrote checks and floated the program. And then there was
 the time that I knew we deserved a much better deal, and
 Gary, the owner of the station, went ahead and gave it to
 us. Then there was my expensive rent, but my very kind,
 flexible landlord. Then there were all those months of
 having no other choice but to stay in one place and finally
 make up my mind about what is important in this world
 and what is not. And to think, it's getting better. ++
 _________________
 
 Eric Francis is a professional astrologer and investigative
 reporter traveling Europe. Visit his Internet sites at
 http://www.Star-Navigator.com, or e-mail him at:
 ethos@Star-Navigator.com.