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 psycho-babble 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). Location for all mundante charts is set for the Great Pyramid at Giza; the choice being strictly arbitrary in any case. 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: This month’s forecast incorporates elements of (and refers to) my complete 2016 World Forecast Highlights (38 8-1/2 x 11” illustrated pages); focused, amplified and elaborated with details for the month as appropriate. The full version of my 2016 World Forecast Highlights is 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. Orders may also be placed direct from your own PayPal account page to rnolle@astropro.com – or by using the AstroPro PayPal order page.

"All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."
-- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
 

The Skinny

March brings the first solar eclipse of the year, which just happens to be the first SuperMoon of the year as well. And since it is a solar eclipse, which is always by definition a new moon, this is in fact a Stealth SuperMoon; i.e., the kind you can’t see, as opposed to the big, gloriously showy full moon variety. (It’s the first of three consecutive Stealth SuperMoons, truth be told: on March 9, April 7 and May 6.)

As with any SuperMoon, and particularly a SuperMoon eclipse, this signals a surge in powerful currents coursing through Earth’s atmosphere, seas and crust. Inevitably, an increase in strong storms, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and extreme tides will accompany the SuperMoon. This time around, the effective shock window for these kinds of phenomena runs from March 2 to March 16 (extended beyond the normal three days either way because this is a solar eclipse).

There’s much more to March than just this Stealth SuperMoon eclipse, as important as it is. (Geophysical and personal details to follow.) There’s also a major planetary aspect of historic importance this month; namely the Jupiter-Saturn square on March 23. This one too has an effective range (orb) that extends far beyond the date it becomes partile (exact). These two planets hold to within a few degrees of exact quadrature (270° angle, in this case) from late February through mid-June, with exact quadratures on March 23 and May 26.

This alignment times a major turning point in law, government, politics and economics - in history, not to put too fine a point on it. In short, as described in the full version of my 2016 World Forecast Highlights (see pages 4-7), we live in interesting times. No wonder so many people tell me they’re feeling like we’re on the edge of some kind of precipice! What kind, and what happens next? Let’s dig into it.

The 2015-2016 Jupiter-Saturn Square

If past is prologue, then the reappearance of the same Sixth Century celestial sequence starting with the Great T-Square of 2006 makes a lot of sense. For more on Justinian’s T-Square (536 CE) and its reappearance starting in 2006, see "The Dark Ages Sky Train" (pages 2-11) in the full version of my 2016 World Forecast Highlights.

2016 continues the return of more of the same celestial events that followed in the wake of the 536 T-Square. It starts with Jupiter’s waning (270°) square from Virgo to Saturn in Sagittarius, paralleling the one in 545-546 CE (in the midst of Justinian’s plague). This occurs twice in 2016, on March 23 and May 26; following the first in this three-peat series, on August 3 of 2015. Jupiter and Saturn remain within a few degrees of their exact square from late February through late June this year. In short, this is no ‘one and done’ phenomenon. It puts its stamp on the nature and sequence of world events for much of 2016.

What to expect, under the aegis of the Jupiter-Saturn square? It always bespeaks a time when bedrock institutions are undergoing major renovation. Not just tinkering, mind you; but wholesale remodeling, with a few teardowns along the way. Never bet on the status quo at times like this, especially not in the wake of five years of the Uranus-Pluto square that ushered in the Arab Spring and Occupy Movement back in 2011. This operates at every fundamental level of civilization: the economy, government, politics, the social system, culture.

Examples of this wholesale political remodeling abound, from the increasing fracturing of the Eurozone and rebirth of Russian power politics, to the disintegration of the US two-party power structure in the 2016 Presidential campaign. (For the outcome of that mess, see pages 36-38 in the full version of my 2016 World Forecast Highlights.) It’s just getting started, folks . . .

This last square before the next conjunction – that’s what a waning square is – always presages what amounts to a last ditch effort by the powers that be to maintain their grip on power, by using their power to restructure things in such a way that the masses won’t turn to "eating the rich". Granted, there’s a whole spectrum for this kind of reform, from a well-managed transition to a calamitous revolution. Coming on the heels of the Uranus-Pluto square as we are, the outcome appears to lean more to the calamitous than the well-managed end of the scale. The one thing you can be sure it won’t be, is more of the same. Things always fall apart, to a greater or lesser degree, when “the center cannot hold”. The center has held fairly well so far, in the advanced industrial west. But it’s hanging on by a thread. As for the rest of the world, look around you – at Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, etc. As Yeats described it in The Second Coming:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Incidentally, the much ballyhooed 2016 US Presidential Election takes place very much under the shadow of this year’s Jupiter-Saturn square; but even more exactly under the Saturn-Neptune square, much as the 2008 Election happened under the aegis of that year’s Saturn-Uranus opposition. And so far, the campaign very much brings to mind the last two lines from Yeats above.

This year’s Jupiter-Saturn square is quite unique, apart from its parallel to the same planet-aspect-sign combination in the wake of Justinian’s T-Square; as I have been pointing out in my past few annual forecasts. It’s that last one, the final act, before the 2020 Great Chronocrator – a landmark at the frontier of a New Order of the Ages. Garden variety Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions come along only once every 20 years. But once every 160 years or so, a world historic Jupiter-Saturn conjunction comes along. It’s called the Trigonalis, so named because it’s a change in the element wherein the Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions take place. (The last Trigonalis oc-curred in 1842.)

There are four astrological elements in all, each comprised of three signs. In order, the fire signs are Aries, Leo and Sagittarius. Next come the earth signs, Taurus, Virgo and Capricorn. Then come the air signs, Gemini, Libra and Aquarius. And last are the water signs, Cancer, Scorpio and Pisces. That’s where the Tri in Trigonalis comes from: it refers to the three signs that comprise each of the four elements.

The Great Chronocrator conjunction occurs in the three signs of one element for 160 years or so, and then changes to the next element. That change of element is called the Grand Mutation, or the Trigonalis (again, because each element comprises three signs). The last Trigonalis, which ushered in the earth sign series of Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions, occurred in 1842 – just as the Industrial Revolution hit its stride. The series of earth sign Chronocrators was unbroken from 1841 through 1961. At that point, as often happens, the next (1980-1981) Chronocrator was out of elemental sequence, slipping from earth into the next element, air. The earth sign series resumed in 2000, with one final conjunction (in Taurus). Now we await the next Trigonalis, the 2020 conjunction in Aquarius. It establishes an air sign series of Chronocrators that will continue unbroken until 2159, when the interloper from the next element (water) intervenes before the end of the air sequence in 2179.

The earth sign Chronocrator series coincides with the development of what we now call modern civilization: materialistic, industrial, capitalist, and global. Beginning with the 1980-81 air sign interloper, the signature themes of the next civilization arose, represented by among other things the personal computer, the cell phone and the rise of the Internet. It’s a civilization of the ethereal and virtual, rather than the physical and substantial. Wealth is increasingly measured in information, ideas and communication. And the means of production are more and more dominated by the creations of that technology – e.g. algorithms, computerized industrial robots, High Frequency Trading (HFT), autonomous vehicles, etc.

The time is now growing short for us to think once more about the unthinkable, to wrap our minds around the coming event that will (perhaps literally) blow our minds. I’m referring to what’s called the Technological Singularity, which is what happens when we humans create our own successors. Science fiction has explored the topic for decades, and Hollywood has spectacularly painted the pictures for us (e.g. James Cameron’s Terminator movies). I've been describing for years now, in my World Forecast Highlights, how the period between the 1980 mutation Jupiter-Saturn conjunction (the first air interloper in the earth sign series of these alignments) and the 2020 Trigonalis (the first in an unbroken air sign series of the conjunction) marked a temporal watershed between eras that would be as different as the Industrial Revolution was from the agrarian civilization that preceded it. Arguably, the earth Sign Chronocrator series and the corresponding Industrial Revolution define modern civilization. We're heading into the home stretch of the next civilization’s dawn: The Singularity approaches as the next Jupiter-Saturn conjunction draws closer.

I promise you this. It won't be The Terminator: I'm looking not for a bang, but more of a long drawn-out whimper. This is one of the reasons I’ve been saying and writing for years now that there won’t be a recovery from the current "Great Recession" until the next Chronocrator arrives. This old world is obsolete, and the next one will be as unimaginable to us as iPhones and Moonshots were to the peasant farmers of the 19th Century. Business as usual is coming to an end; the much ballyhooed "New World Order" creeps in as of 2020.

Matthew 26:11 had it wrong: the poor will not always be with us. They’ll be the first to go. The poor have always been fodder for civilization. They do the grunt work, and get enough in return to keep them alive. When grunt work disappears, so will the poor. Do you think an Artificial Intelligence as far advanced over us as we are over cattle will have any use for us? The AI is amoral. Once it’s smarter than us, it will be beyond our ability to control. At that point we become nothing more than competition for scarce resources.

Ironically, Terminator got one thing right: Skynet. Skynet is entirely appropriate for this air sign Chronocrator world waiting just around the corner. Artificial self-ware intelligence is coming, it will be autonomous, and ultimately it will come to see humans as competing for precious resources. But there will be no need for the AIs to hunt down their obsolete human predecessors. Once they control us and the resources, it will be a simple matter to starve us out. Not a slaughter, but a siege. Mind you, while the process as a whole is effectively born with the 2020 Chronocrator, it doesn’t spring full grown from the brow of Zeus – any more than the Industrial Revolution was fully evolved in 1842. This is an historical process, one that takes generations to mature. We’ll be able to see it coming. But I don’t think we could stop it, any more than our peasant forbears could have stopped the iron horse of the Industrial Revolution in its tracks. Besides, this isn’t just a process grounded in a couple Chronocrator cycles reaching back a few centuries. It’s way bigger than that. By my reckoning, this whole process reaches back some 1,500 years, to Emperor Justinian’s Great T-Square.

The First Stealth SuperMoon of 2016

World-historic megacycles like Justinian’s T-Square and the current Jupiter-Saturn square aside, the news of the day will more than surely pay more attention to the geophysical storm warnings raised by this month’s SuperMoon solar eclipse – as if the media want to distract us with Mother Nature’s relatively ephemeral disasters rather than focus on the longer-term cyclical convolutions created by our own species.

In that light, March, April and May usher in a trio of what I have come to call Stealth SuperMoons; that is, a new moon SuperMoon. Full moon SuperMoons get all the press, for obvious reasons. They’re gloriously huge in the sky, so big and bright that people can’t help noticing them – especially at sundown, when that great, big full moon rises in the east as the Sun sets in the west.

A new moon, even if it’s a SuperMoon, is on the other hand invisible to the naked eye. The Moon and Sun are in the same spot in the sky when the moon is new, which means that the Moon gets lost in the Sun’s glare when it’s above the horizon; and it goes down below the horizon at sunset. We can’t see it, but it’s still there – and, because it’s a SuperMoon, this invisible Moon is much closer to Earth than usual. It has the same pronounced tidal pull on the crust, seas and sky of our home planet as all SuperMoons. We just can’t see it. Hence, a stealth SuperMoon. (As the fox told the Little Prince, "what is essential is invisible to the eye.")

This first stealth SuperMoon of 2016 also happens to be a total eclipse of the Sun. Among other things, this means that it opens its shock window early, because solar eclipses have a bigger shock window than any other type of lunation – seven days either side of the exact event, in fact. So the March 9 SuperMoon shock window opens on March 2, initiating a heightened storm, tide and seismic risk period (including Magnitude 5+ earthquakes and headline volcanic eruptions) that extends all the way through the 16th Get ready: disturbances in the crust, seas and skies of Planet Earth, as well as in the neural networks of individuals and the infrastructure of our civilization, are huge on the horizon this month. Not end of the world huge, mind you: my 2012 World Forecast Highlights well and truly gave the lie to that sort of nonsense. But get your safety nets ready nonetheless. Most of us won’t need them, but those who do will sorely regret not having them. You might want to pay special attention to this 19° Pisces SuperMoon if you were born with significant planetary placements or other natal chart factors at or near 19d of the mutable signs; namely Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius and Pisces – and most especially 19° Pisces and Virgo, the conjunction and opposition points for this SuperMoon. (Check your chart!)

Speaking of this Stealth SuperMoon solar eclipse position, note that 19° Pisces happens to be in tight square aspect to the Jupiter-Saturn square – turning it into a T-Square. I see this as a sign that stormy weather and earth-shaking developments are not only geophysical this month. Politics and economics will be drawn into the crosshairs at the same time. The powers that be, the establishment – they’re shaken to the core this month in particular, and more particularly within a week of the March 9 eclipse. "How the mighty have fallen" takes on special significance at a time like this. Markets will quake.

Being astronomical in scale – involving a special alignment of Earth, Moon and Sun – SuperMoonsare planet-wide in scope. The whole of our home planet responds to the amplified tides surging through the skies, seas and crust of Earth at times like this. No place is entirely safe – storms can strike anywhere, for example - although some special risk areas are pretty well geographically defined. Extreme tides happen along the coasts, for example. Most seismic activity will focus on known risk zones (fault lines, etc.). That said, I advocate and practice a set of sensible preparations for such possibilities, and make a point of checking my list coming into periods of lunar extremes like this. A well-stocked pantry, some basic emergency supplies, a full tank of gas and some ready cash won’t go to waste if you don’t need them – but you might be wasted if you need them and don’t have them.

You might want to pay special attention to the geophysical component of this particular SuperMoon eclipse if you’ll be under its shadow, for example in Australia, Indonesia and Southeast Asia. And there are any number of other locations as sketched out in this astro-locality map for the eclipse – places where, even though you won’t see the sun get eclipsed, you may see and feel evidence of its geophysical presence in terms of extreme tides, powerful storms and perhaps even increased notable seismic activity. And its geopolitical presence as well, in terms of unstable markets and political instability. Borders, treaties and alliances all get significantly stressed.

I’m not by any means saying you can go to autopilot if you’ll be outside of one of these zones during the March 2-16 SuperMoon shock window. Again, this is a planetary phenomenon, and therefore planet-wide in scope. But a little extra preparation and influence is these particular areas can’t hurt.

The March 23 Lunar Eclipse

Last but not least among the major celestial configurations this month is the March 23 penumbral lunar (full moon) eclipse at 3° 17’ Libra. Penumbral eclipses are "gray-outs," rather than blackouts, as the Moon passes through only the edges (the penumbra) of Earth’s shadow. The March 23 eclipse is uncomplicated by other planetary configurations. Only the Jupiter-Saturn square is at work for this one, but it’s way off the early cardinal sign axis of the eclipse itself. Consequently, I expect this eclipse to focus mainly on the geophysical rather than the geopolitical. In that regard, eclipses are much like SuperMoons in terms of their connection with storms and seismicity, but they tend to rank a little lower in magnitude. Generally speaking, don’t expect an eclipse to herald the kind of extreme tidal surges so typical of a SuperMoon, for example. But there remains a notable historical connection between eclipses and strong storms and seismicity, including moderate to severe (Magnitude 5 and up) earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions. This is especially true for the March 23 lunar eclipse, coming just days after the vernal equinox. So be ready: March 20-26 will see a surge in strong storms with high winds and heavy precipitation, as well as moderate-to-severe seismic activity (Magnitude 5 and up earthquakes, plus newsworthy volcanic eruptions).

At the personal level, eclipses point to an emphatic focus on a particular facet of life, described by the area in the natal chart where the eclipse falls. Check your chart: if it features significant points around three degrees of the cardinal signs (Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn), then this eclipse time probably has special significance in your life. However there’s a collective as well as an individual dimension to personal experience, so be aware that tension and conflict will be stirred up at the collective level as well. Runaway panics (in markets and elsewhere) are likely, mobs can be stirred up, confrontation and belligerence are more the norm than the exception at times like this. The caution signs are up! Better to be on the sidelines than in the thick of the fray.

Acknowledgments

All mundane astrological charts as well as eclipse and astro-locality maps are set for the Universal Time (UT) of the event, and calculated and produced using Esoteric Technologies’ Solar Fire Gold Version 7.0.8. Charts are set for the location of the Great Pyramid - a purely arbitrary choice, since location is irrelevant to these charts. Unless sotherwise noted, sky map images are screen captures from the Pocket Universe app for iPhone, or produced by Starry Night for Windows; storm tracks are screen captures from The Weather Channel app for iPhone; and earthquake maps are screen captures from the Earthquake Alerts ör QuakeWatch app for iPhone.

SPECIAL FEATURE: This month's birthdays of the famous and infamous (with astrological birth charts)

Richard Nolle, Certified Professional Astrologer consultations/orders (AmEx/Discover/MasterCard/Visa) 800-527-8761 data/fax 480-753-6261 - email rnolle@astropro.com Box 26599 - Tempe, AZ 85285-6599 - USA www.astropro.com