Planets that Break Your Face

This is my blood.

Two days ago, at about 3:30 in the afternoon – I broke my face. Well, not really, but that’s a figure of speech I grew up using and which is quite appropriate to what actually happened. See, my 5th grade son wanted me to play this complex version of “tag” with him and about 20 other 5th and 6th graders. I could only catch 1 or 2 of ‘em. They were just too fast for me. So I decided to get on my bike and chase ‘em down.

You see, I’m really good on a bike. I used to be a semi-pro freestyle trickster. But these Japanese bikes are different, they are bigger and, this is the really import part, they get the brakes backwards. Yeah – they put the front brake on the right-hand side. So, I am fully absorbed in irresponsible kid-mode, chasing these 10-11 year olds at super-high speed around turns when, after reaching out to tag one, I suddenly need to stop right away before hitting a wall.

So, I do what instinct tells me – get ready to fishtail the back tire out to the right, and turn left, while “skidding out”. So, of course, I slam on the brakes to start the skid… the right-hand brake.

Oppps…

In about a half a second my face hit the road. I had sunglasses on, to look like this character the kids wanted me to look like. The right side smashed against the street just before my skull. My son was kneeling at my side in about 3 seconds (divine arrangement), “Are you OK dad?”

“I don’t know, am I OK?” I asked and showed him the right side of my face.

“No. You’re not OK at all. It’s really bad. There is blood everywhere.”

As it turns out, it wasn’t really that bad. Just two gashes, no damage to my eye or skull. Tons of blood. More blood than I ever spilled out of a wound before. But it turned out to be fun, and a good way to show my son how dangerous a bike can be, and stuff like that. But anyway, now for the astrology. Let’s see if we can figure out what planets “caused” me to break my face.

Basic Data

I’m:

Vic DiCara

July 27, 1970 at 7:38 pm

Bay Shore, New York, USA

I’m doing this chart as I do with all charts: whole-sign houses, tropical signs, sidereal (lahiri) nakṣatra, degree-specific Indian aspects, and basic viṁśottarī daśā using nakṣatra year-length (359.017 days)

Bear In Mind

Before you jump off explaining how my birth chart is prone to face-breaking, please bear in mind that I don’t usually break my face. In fact in my whole life I never broke a bone – despite being a BMXer, skateboarder, and spending my youth and twenties in really dangerous situations.

Also bear in mind a few other things about this same day.

• It was my janma-tithi (the same lunar phase as the day I was born) – well not exactly it was the same phase, but in the opposite fortnight. I was born on kṛṣṇa-ekādaśī and this face-breaking event happened on gaura-ekādaśī.
• I met my son’s new 5th grade teacher earlier that day for the first time. It was pleasant and she gave a very positive review for him
• A court case was held that I am connected with as the plaintiff.
• Later in the day I received a large parcel from Vṛṇdāvana, India with a super-excellent new mṛdāṅga drum to replace my old one that had broken.

Initial Theories

Where does one look for a physical injury? Well certainly it would be ludicrous to give an explanation that doesn’t involve the first house and lord – since that is the house of physical things like the body. My first house is Capricorn (Asc at 25 degrees), so my first lord is Saturn, who at my birth was at 21 degrees of Taurus.

Besides this there is more standard, fundamental theory: accidents and pain comes from natural malefics and painful, detrimental house lords. Those lords for me might be Mercury (6th lord), Sun (8th lord), and Jupiter (12th lord).

Daśā

My usual astro software malfunctioned and still isn’t fixed, but it appears from my calculations that my face-breaking ceremony happened in the Jupiter / Venus / Rahu / Mercury Daśā. All the natural benefics are involved here, but we can also take note that Jupiter is the 12th lord and Mercury the 6th. Meanwhile Venus is my 5th lord – and the accident did involve children (a 5th house topic).

Transits

Four planets have congregated in Taurus – which is my 5th house (children) and the home of my 1st lord (Body / Physical). Two of them are Malefics: Mars and the Sun. The sun also happens to be my 8th lord. The two of them, Mars and Sun, are nearly 180 degrees away from my natal Jupiter, and thus cast a strong aspect upon it. Jupiter is my daśā lord, and the 12th lord (detraction from physical) and the 3rd lord too (sports, like riding a bike). On that note, Mars is the lord of the 11th house (games, like playing tag).

So the daśā lord has something inherently disposing it towards allowing events that involve detraction from/to the physical being, and can also have to do with sports – and it was at the time influenced both by the 8th lord (unforeseen events) who is also a malefic, and Mars (injury) who is also the 11th lord (games). So it does facilitate the event of getting a sudden physical injury while playing a game involving athletics.

Further, Saturn was in transit of my natal Sun/Mars combo in my eighth house. Additionally, the transiting Sun/Mars previously mentioned are also under the aspect of transiting Saturn.

We’ve seen how the daśā planet, Jupiter was involved (being aspected by Sun/Mars, who themselves are aspected by Saturn). Now, the inner-daśā planet, Venus, is also involved because it is the closest transiting planet to the Sun/Mars transit pair – and also conjoins transiting Ketu. This means transiting Venus was with two malefics (Sun/Mars) and Ketu (a planet who can really amplify and exacerbate malefics in it’s vicinity).  Furthermore transiting Venus and Ketu are not outside the significant influence of transiting Saturn’s 180 degree aspect.

The inner-inner daśā planet, Rahu is also involved, transit-Rahu being conjoined transit Saturn while transit Ketu is conjoined Sun/Mars/Venus.

My first lord and house are also involved. Transiting Saturn has a strong 60 degree aspect to my ascendant, while it’s 270 degree aspect falls upon my Sun/Mars combo in the 8th house, and it’s 180 degree aspect falls upon my natal 1st lord. As mentioned before, the congregation of Sun/Mars/Venus/Ketu also occupies the same sign as my natal 1st lord.

It’s also curious that the ascendant at the time was almost exactly opposite my natal ascendant.

Conclusion

No doubt we can see that there is considerable transiting malefic influence on my natal 1st lord and all the daśā planets, not excluding my 8th house factors and 1st house itself. Therefore we can accept that a physical injury happened at this point. We also see that much of the action in the transit chart focuses on the 5th and 11th houses, so we can accept that an event can arise involving playing games with children. So the event – breaking my face while playing with kids – is quite acceptable from the astrological point of view.

In final conclusion, this is the sort of thing that gives confidence that astrology is a substantial science; yet at the same time demonstrates that the complexity of the science is quite off-putting and daunting. While it is not impossible to reverse engineer the astrological significance after the event occurs, it still seems nearly impossible to look through the nearly infinite possibilities of transits for a given period of time, find this one as being particularly significant, and then correctly predict that an injury will occur while playing with children. It’s not impossible, but it’s similar to finding a needle or two thrown into a haystack.

And that, my friends, is just a fact of how astrology works, and the complexity of life, destiny and karma.

Riding home from soccer practice the next night with my son, he said to me, “Dad, I think Krishna wanted you to pull the wrong break. I mean, when you get a boo-boo like that it’s supposed to hurt a lot. But it didn’t hurt you at all. So Krishna must be doing something. And I think he wanted me to see you fall so I can see how bad I could get hurt if I don’t wear a helmet.”

I love that boy.

- Vic DiCara

www.vicdicara.com

My New Book is Available! 27 Stars, 27 Gods

27 Stars, 27 Gods

The Astrological Mythology of Ancient India

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If you are a lover of India and her culture, you will delight in these deep revelations and rare expositions of familiar gods like Viṣṇu, not-so-familiar gods like Varuṇa, and nearly forgotten gods like Ajaikapāt.

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The 150 pages of this book are abundantly replete with exact references and footnotes to satisfy the scholars among you. The book is dripping with dramatic storytelling, filled with philosophy as clear and deep as a Himalayan lake, and precisely presents the perfectly useful astrological symbolism of the divine stars.

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A Statement on Pricing

A Statement on Pricing

Many of you have been with me for several years now, and have watched me experiment with pricing my astrological services – sometimes to great extremes. Over the last few years I have tried everything from normal, to low, to donation pricing. After all this experimentation I’ve reached a conclusion. I’d like to take a few moments to explain it to you.

There is the noble idea that “Knowledge should be given freely.” But this necessitates another noble principle, “Those who give knowledge should never be charged for anything.” These two interdependent noble ideas actually worked in many ancient and classical cultures, especially in India’s history; but in today’s culture of global capitalism, it’s a pipe-dream.

If I couldn’t give it for free, I tried giving it cheaply. But the result was exhausting. I had to overwork to keep up with my expenses (I support a family with three children, living in Japan). I felt that the quality of my work declined somewhat, which I dislike, and I lost the precious time an astrologer requires to continuously study and contemplate.

I tried another angle: donations. I thought that this may allow people with less economic facility to get knowledge, while people with more economic facility could be more generous and make up the difference. It did work somewhat, but “making up the difference” still amounted to working at very inexpensive rates, and thus the same exhaustion, overwork and loss of quality. People in general cannot be blamed for not understanding the hours of study that must go into every hour of giving a reading, so it’s not really feasible to ask them to donate as much or as often as I need.

And so, to my decision: Fixed prices that I know to be fair to myself and my clients.

To determine exactly what that is I did a survey of seven astrologers with similar credentials and situations as I and found their average fee for a birth chart reading was $300, for a transit or progression was $265, and for a compatibility reading was $280. I used these figures as the guidepost for establishing my fee structure.

From here on, I don’t intend to experiment anymore with pricing. My fees will not change except as fluctuating currency values necessitate from time to time. Here are the readings I will offer.

Thank you,

Vic DiCara

Origin of the Sidereal Zodiac

The stars of sidereal space are a valid and important astrological entity. India (and almost all cultures) has a valid system of dividing sidereal space with the Moon as the focal point, not the Sun as in tropical space. This system has 27 divisions, not 12, because there are that many sunrises during the time it takes the Moon to complete a full circuit of the heavens.

The idea of 12 sidereal signs comes from wrongly assuming that the correlation between the stars and signs is permanent. In fact, there is no permanent correlation between the two, the signs eternally and very gradually drift backwards through the stars – a phenomena commonly known as “precession of the equinox.”

There is a valid need to correlate the signs and stars because their relationship is important for defining very long periods of time (“ages”) and for knowing how and when to keep solar and lunar calendar systems synchronized.

Babylonians measured the correlation of their autumnal equinox with the heliacal rising of stars they called The Scales. Greeks measured the discrepancy of tropical Aries against a stellar counterpart bearing the same name. Ancient and Classical Indians measured the heliacal position of the equinox in reference to their fixed stars. For example, the Ṛg Veda notes Kṛttikā as the “first” star and the beginning of the celestial circle, because in Ṛg Vedic times, four to five thousand years ago, Kṛttikā heliacally rose with the Vernal Equinox. Later Indian works from nearly two thousand years ago note Aśvinī as the first star, because at that time Aśvinī was the star heliacally rising with the equinox.

Projecting the 12 zodiac divisions into space, based on the then-current position of the vernal equinox was useful for mathematics but opened a door for people to think of the signs as stellar entities. It is an easy mistake to make considering that for centuries there was almost no significant difference between the signs and their homonymic sidereal namesakes.