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

Participate in an Astrological Study

I would like to do a small study. Would you like to take part?

Observation: Children develop the ability to speak at different ages. Specifically, when they consistantly start using single words to denote specific people and objects. (I think between 9 and 15 months is average for this).

Hypothesis: The retrogression cycles of Mercury could cause the child’s first Mercury-return to have a similar fluctuation.

Study: I would like to collect a sample of data for children, where their developmental progress in this area is known, and see if the hypothesis bears out.

If it does it is not only interesting, but a fairly significant step towards demonstrating in a scientifically empirical manner that astrology is potentially reliable for predicting practical events.

HOW TO PARTICIPATE: Send be the date / time / place of a child’s birth and a note of his or her verbal development; specifically say when they began to consistently use their first word. Contact me through www.vicdicara.com/contact.php

Data collection is as crucial as the experiment itself, so please be careful to give an accurate and non-biased description.

New Birth Chart Overview is now Available!!!

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Here are a few images from a sample reading…

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Thanks,
Vic

Reading a Tropical Horoscope With Indian (“Vedic”) Techniques.

I have come to embrace the conclusion that the 12 sidereal signs of modern Indian astrology are not in line with the classical Indian definitions of the 12 signs, and have therefore adopted a somewhat unique system of calculating the 12 signs tropically, but calculating the 27 stars (“nakshatra”) sidereally.

Many people have kindly read about my reasoning behind this and the vast majority of readers have expressed appreciation or at least respect for my conclusions. But almost everyone asks, “Can you show us how to do it? How do you read a chart with Tropical signs.”

I wonder if there is any need to show how, because there is no special new technique involved. You simply follow the classical principles. Using a classical principles with a classical (tropical) definition of the 12 signs just produces clearer, simpler results. You don’t have to do anything new or adopt any new techniques.

But now that I’ve said that, I feel like I should say a little bit more.

When you switch to classical, tropical signs, you will want to be more pure and simple about your techniques. You can stick with the fundamental basics and discard all the complicated fine-print that has developed over the centuries since the classical period ended. So you would probably really want to go back to “square 1″ for a moment and organize your system and approach to reading the horoscope again from the ground up. Kind of like a spring-cleaning.

Start by diving more deeply into how you understand the method of interpreting planets in signs. Reread the classical descriptions of planets in signs, and figure out what they are really talking about.

Next do the same for planets in houses. And follow that up by doing the same with lords in houses. Forget what you have accumulated in your mind over the years about planets in signs and houses, etc. and take a fresh new look at the classics. Glancing back from the classics to your sample horoscopes – you will gain much more clarity on the fundamentals. So much more that you will feel very confident to burn all the bookshelves full of astrological fine-print that has accumulated literally in your library and figuratively in your mind. You  will be liberated to stick with the simple basics!

After you refresh your conception of planets and lords in signs and houses, next revisit the second level of basics. Start with dignity. (Re)learn about how to calculate dignity, and then about how to calculate dignity not just for a sign, but for a specific degree in the sign (by way of the varga subdivisions, the amshas). This information is all right there in the classical literature. Try to figure out what dignity is really all about – how it affects the positivity or negativity of what a planet does in a sign and house. Check it out in action in your sample charts, and feel relieved that now you can forget about all kinds of madening concepts like exaltation in retrogression and neech-bhanga-yogas. Using simple degree-specific dignity alone, with tropical signs, you will be reading charts easier, more clearly and more confidently than you did before.

After degree-specific dignity, review degree-specific aspects.

Then you have pretty much taken your “second birth” as an astrologer. My congratulations.

PS – remember, for this to really work wonders, you need to let go of everything you think you know and you have read about, especially everything that sounds remotely complex. Take a fresh new look at the classics on the classical, fundamental basics… apply it to the tropical horoscope (case with whole sign houses, and classical planets only), and you’ll be transformed.

PPS – dont’ forget to keep the nakshatras sidereal, and therefore don’t let your vimshottari dasha dates change. If you want to go into interpreting planets in nakshatra, this is also a great time to start. =)