If you were expecting some kind of sun sign nonsense, forget about it. This is real astrology for the real world, not some mystical mumbo-jumbo word salad. If it's real astrology for yourself that you want, you can get it by phone or in print. And if you need help deciphering the astrological glyphs in the graphics accompanying this article, see Astroglyphs: Astrological Symbols Guide. Please note: this forecast is expressed in terms of Universal Time (UT, aka GMT). Also please be aware that, while I never change a forecast once it's published, I do post errata to acknowledge typographical errors and the like.
PLEASE NOTE: I apologize for the delay in posting this free (and greatly abbreviated) version of my 2012 World Forecast Highlights). First and foremost, his was due to the 2012 World Forecast Highlights being bigger (34 8-1/2 X 11" pages, illustrated) – and I hope, better – than ever before. Despite all that extra work, every one of the pre-paid copies went out to my clients on December 31. There were so many orders (and so many every day since), that there just hasn’t been time to publish the complimentary online version until now. Nor has there been time to prepare the usual longer excerpt. Thanks for your patience and understanding! Meanwhile, if you’d like your own copy of the full 2012 Forecast Highlights, it’s available in hard copy by mail ($75) or as a PDF document by email ($50). Orders may be phoned in (toll-free from anywhere in North America to 800-527-8761) and charged to any major credit card. PayPal orders may be placed direct from your own PayPal account page to rnolle@astropro.com – or by using the astropro PayPal order page.
Stop worrying about the world ending today. It's already tomorrow in Australia.
-- Charles M. Schulz
The most important thing about the year ahead is that there’s another one coming up right behind it. Normally, that should go without saying. But the past few years have been full of hysteria about the end of the world. For example, take the American evangelist Rev. Harold Camping, who made headlines last year predicting that the Rapture of New Testament lore would arrive on May 21, 2011. When that date came and went uneventfully, Rev. Camping declared he had miscalculated, and that October 21 would be the Ascension. And yet, here we all are . . . still. (As it turns out, Rev. Camping has made a good dozen of these failed predictions since 1976.)
You’d think people would learn. But no, the Mayan cultists are having a field day whipping themselves into frenzy about the world ending on December 21, 2012. Wanna bet? Real Mayan scholars – the academics, as opposed to those sensationalizing Chicken Little types on YouTube, Coast to Coast AM etc. – know full well that the Mayan calendar does not end this year or any other year. Anyone who believes otherwise is in for the same rude awakening as Rev. Camping’s followers, or the Mayan bozos who read their old calendar as indicating that those Spanish guys in shiny suits were really gods. (Yeah, right: look how that one turned out.) And as for that silliness about Earth, Sun and the Galactic Center all lining up at the winter solstice this year . . . it’s no more true in 2012 than it was in 2011, 2010, 2009, etc. Every winter solstice sees these celestial points aligned. Here’s the skinny: if you’re freaked over the Mayan Apocalypse mumbo-jumbo, it’s time to get a clue – and a grip. This is not the end of the world . . . only the end of the world as we know it, in ways and at times in the coming year that I’ll describe on the following pages.
It’s scary and exciting – in a Stephen King novel kind of way – to fantasize about the world ending on some date certain. I’ve long thought that this fantasy stems from raging against the dying of the light; a foolish human desire to project mortality upon the world at large because we know it awaits us all as individuals. The reality is more prosaic. The world doesn’t end in our time. Instead, we have empires ending, civilization shifting, the death of one economic system being the birth pangs of the next. It’s happening now, and it’s déjà vu all over again. We’ve been in the midst of this for a generation already, and we’re now in the home stretch of the transformation coming into the world in 2020.
If you only pay attention to the news, you’re forgiven for thinking this is one mundane political or financial crisis piling on the next. If you’re been reading my forecasts for the past half-dozen years or so, you know that it’s much more than that: the true context is historic, even epochal, rather than a mere sequence of headlines. Do you see riots and rising unemployment, one nation or industry rising as another declines? Or do you see true? What you see and know depends ever so much on whether you watch the news and the ‘Net, or watch the sky and steep yourself in history. I’ll lay out the historical context before we’re done. But for now, let’s draw a sharper focus on the dominant themes in the months ahead. Among the most significant celestial heralds for 2012 must be included the near-exact Jupiter-Saturn opposition (within two degrees of precise alignment from late December 2011 through January 2012, the final near-alignment in the 20-year cycle of this opposition which was last exact on March 28, 2011). This is another part of the Great Chronocrator cycle I’ve been writing about for several years now, the changeover from the earth sign Chronocrators that have held sway from the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. This is the last Jupiter-Saturn opposition in the earth sign Chronocrator series. It points to a breakdown in the social, political, cultural and economic order – and the response to that breakdown, which is always initially an attempt to preserve the status quo, until that attempt itself breaks down, as it must.
This particular cycle is far more extreme than most, because it coincided with the 2008-1010 Saturn-Uranus opposition. This is an alignment which I described several years ago as signifying "panic in the markets, panic in the streets, people in need of rescue, just a whiff of revolution in the air". Per my forecasts, these things have been much in evidence these past few years, from strikes and riots in the streets of Athens, Paris, London, Port-au-Prince and Tehran to debt crises and wild swings in equity markets worldwide; into precious metals and away from threatened bonds and currencies; to the unemployment and foreclosure crises here in the States. Everything in the sky promises that this trend grows this year, and for the next 2-3 years. Then, in 2020, comes the Great Recovery.
With a Mars Max cycle bringing things to a boil well into July, a Venus Max pointing to improving economic and market conditions starting in late March, and a Urans-Pluto square signaling barricades in the streets and breakthroughs in science and technology on and off all year - not to mention five SuperMoons and four ecclipses - 2012 is bound to be amazing. For the whole story (including my 2012 US Presidential election forecast), see the full version of my 2012 World Forecast Highlights as described at the top of this page.
