A client emailed me recently and asked my take on the astrological energies that were occurring with the recent Los Angeles fires.
I am familiar with Pacific Palisades and Malibu having lived on Point Dume in Malibu in the early 1970s. A most beautiful area bounded by the Pacific Ocean on the west and the Santa Monica Mountains on the east, the Palisades and Malibu are liable to wildfires during the dry season and mudslides during the rainy season.
One time when I was living in Malibu and returning home from dinner in L.A., the rains were so intense they were triggering mudslides flowing down onto PCH [Pacific Coast Highway]. With bulldozers scooping up mud from the roadway, the California Highway Patrol stopped cars from proceeding, then allowed only residents to go forward led by a California Highway Patrol car in single file, caravan-style.
I remember one Valentine’s eve a boulder over twenty feet in diameter rolled off a hill above PCH in Malibu, rolled across PCH and crushed the fence to a vacant beachfront lot. Fortunately, the giant roll occurred at 2:00 AM with no cars in its path across PCH.
Wildfires are a natural phenomena often ignited by lightning, other times by a human who either negligently or intentionally causes the flareup.
The natural cycles in southern California have winter’s rainy season followed by a dry period. The rains encourage vegetation growth which becomes brittle during the dry season and provides kindle for a lightning strike to trigger a raging fire fanned by high winds. The vegetation is burned leaving the landscape barren. The rains come and with no vegetation to secure the ground, the land gives way to mudslides. The pattern repeats.
Before we moved to Florida thirteen years ago, we lived in Monterey County, California, with an apartment up on the Peninsula close to the school where my wife worked in Pebble Beach and a ‘ranch’ property in the southern part of the county, very rural [my wife would suggest desolate] with the nearest grocery store being a forty-five-minute drive. It was high desert country mentioned in the 1933 John Steinbeck novel To a God Unknown, and our property was suggested to have been the far eastern end of William Randolph Hearst’s vast land holdings on the central coast.
One summer, fires erupted in the Los Padres National Forest to the west of us. We could see the flames on the ridges and checked the post office daily for the updates to the fires and any progress made towards dousing them.
Apart from the wildfires, we experienced earthquakes, one of which was a magnitude 6.5 quake that killed two people and damaged over 50 buildings in Paso Robles. My wife had been in Paso earlier that day but was on the highway coming home. She didn’t feel the quake, but she told me later that if she had felt the quake, we would have been in the car, leaving California, and returning to Connecticut. At the time of the quake, I was inside our home at our ‘ranch’ property about forty miles northwest of Paso. I felt the house shake, went outside, and surfed the land waves from the quake’s aftershocks.
BUT I digress…
Every individual, every country, every city, every entity has an astrology chart based upon the time of their ‘birth’, which for a country can be the time of its founding, for an administration the time of inauguration, for a business the time of opening, etc…
In researching the question of the L.A. fires posed to me, I found it eerily fascinating what the astrological energy configurations indicated.
Los Angeles was founded on September 4th, 1781.
With astrology appreciating and acknowledging the laws of cycles and relativity, we recognize that the natal chart is impacted by transits, where the planets are now vis-à-vis the natal chart.
What stands out in the recent transits to the L.A. chart was the Mutable Sign Grand Cross with transiting Jupiter and Saturn in difficult connections to the L.A. chart’s Sun and Saturn.
Transiting Jupiter in the Air Sign of Gemini enhancing air and wind squared the natal Sun and opposed the natal Saturn, the intensity of the winds could raise questions regarding the management and competency [natal Virgo Sun] and the effectiveness of the physical infrastructure and the organizational structure [natal Saturn].
All of us who have lived in California and especially southern California are familiar with the Santa Ana winds and their potentially destructive influence. Semis have been blown over, fruit orchards destroyed, and houses damaged.
In his 1938 novel, Red Wind, Raymond Chandler wrote: “There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen.”
While transiting Jupiter was triggering a Mutable Sign T-Square to L.A.’s chart, transiting Saturn in Pisces [water] was in orb of a square to natal Saturn indicating delays or restrictions to the water flow. Many of the fire hydrants ran dry with little water to fight the fires. And a 117-million-gallon water reservoir, the Santa Ynez Reservoir, near the Palisades was empty under renovation.
With Saturn also related to structure and management and transiting Saturn opposed L.A.’s natal Sun [executive, leader], the question of competence in the management of the city came into question regarding the mayor herself, the chief executive and chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and the Los Angeles Fire Chief. Even the governor came under blame for lack of brush clearance.
With the planetary aspects impacting the astrological chart for Los Angeles, it is not surprising that issues associated with water, winds, fires, infrastructure, and management competence came into question.
It is interesting that some private individuals relied upon their own resources rather than being dependent upon the government agencies in dealing with the fires. One such case was billionaire developer Rick Caruso, who ran against Karen Bass in the last mayoral election. Caruso hired a private firefighting company to protect and preserve his commercial development in Pacific Palisades with the result of not losing or sustaining damage to any of his buildings.
As the Spanish-American Philosopher George Santayana wrote in 1905: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
The fires may be put out. The rains are likely to come. And the liability of mudslides may threaten the hillsides. The rains will provide sustenance for vegetation growth. The seasons will change, and the dry period will return. The patterns are likely to repeat.
Later in this year of 2025, both Saturn and Neptune will exit the Water Sign of Pisces and enter the Fire Sign of Aries. You can imagine the dramatic shift in energy and their consequent effects.
