The summer is festival time and there must be hundreds of them. Festival organisation has become a real industry and Corona has of course done a lot of harm there. It was also mid-August when once in 1969 the ‘’mother of all festivals”, the hippy climax Woodstock, of which every festival is a bit of an echo, took place.There is no festival that ever reached such a mythical status! To sketch a bit of the atmosphere, the opening ceremony was done by Swami Satchadananda, a yoga teacher..! For astrologers it is good to know something about this, as astrology up to our days is strongly influenced by this subculture, its ideology has given form to modern chart interpretation even down to details.
Click on the download button above to view the Woodstock chart and yes it is bull’s eye! Expansive Jupiter is on the Ascendant a literal picture of the opening session by the the swami, but Jupiter is also of course the planet of the expansion of consciousness and exceeding boundaries. The Great Benefic is in strong mutual reception with the Small Benefic Venus / Lord 1 in elevation near the MC in a position of dominance. Love, peace and understanding. And then all those colours, you could not express the Jupiter/Venus combination more directly. Venus is placed in the sign in which Jupiter is exalted and Jupiter in the sign in which Venus rules. Venus, the planet of beauty, peace and pleasure is on bright Canopus, the main ster in the Argonaut’s Ship, giving it more power.
LSD
Lord 10 is the Moon of emotions, desires and fluidity and it is very appropriately placed in the twelfth house of drugs and addictions. Of course, LSD was everywhere, it was mass-produced and distributed by the CIA as as a “social engineering” experiment (a part of the very sinister MK-Ultra project), which did not make the hippies suspicious by the way. What mattered to them was that there was something to swallow. Mercury is Lord 12 exactly on cusp 12 which emphasizes the whole psychedelic / drugs dimension. That the Moon / Lord 10 is in the twelfth house on the South Node is telling as the South Node is the exit point where the light of the Sun or the Moon can go out.
Confusion
The Moon is the earthy Luminary and it can go out here in experiencing other non-earthy dimensions. Mercury on cusp 12 is also Lord 9 of religions and here the connection and confusion of the real spiritual in the ninth house with the merely astral-psychedelic in the twelfth house, so typical of hippy subculture (and of their “grand-children”, the New Agers), can be seen. It is a bit worrying that Mercury, the pragmatic planet without fixed principles, rules spirituality, Mercury is very, very curious but that is all. Mercury – Lord 9 and 12 – also conjuncts the Part of Spirit (also called Abundance) showing the same confusion of spirituality with the astral-psychedelic. With this Venus (pleasure, love and peace) and Jupiter (expansion) near the angles it is clear why Woodstock has become the ultimate expression of hippy culture, which includes this whole darker side shown by the strong twelfth house emphasis.